Yatin Manerkar recognized with dissertation award honorable mention

Assistant professor Yatin Manerkar, who joins the CSE faculty this fall, was recognized with a 2021 ACM SIGARCH/IEEE CS TCCA Outstanding Dissertation Award Honorable Mention for his PhD dissertation, “Progressive Automated Formal Verification of Memory Consistency in Parallel Processors.” The honorable mention recognizes his dissertation as one of the top theses in the area of computer architecture published in 2020 “for developing scalable, sound, and all-program hardware verification methods that demonstrate the potential of progressive correctness verification from early-stage architectural design to late-stage implementation.”

Manerkar’s dissertation makes fundamental advances in the formal verification of ordering properties related to memory accesses in parallel processors. Verifying these ordering guarantees is critical to ensuring the correct operation of today’s processors, as most of them are parallel architectures where cores use memory accesses to communicate and synchronize with each other.

The dissertation also proposes and demonstrates a novel formal verification flow called “progressive verification” which advocates for formally verifying computing systems throughout their development from early-stage design through to late-stage implementation. Progressive verification can have notable benefits, including finding bugs earlier, reducing verification overhead, and reducing overall development time.

Manerkar completed his PhD at Princeton University in 2020, where he was advised by Prof. Margaret Martonosi, and he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley with Prof. Sanjit Seshia in 2021. He has also worked full-time at Qualcomm Research, and interned at AMD Research and Amazon Web Services.

His research has previously been recogniZed with two best paper nominations, and three of his papers have been honored for their high potential impact as either Top Picks or Honorable Mentions in IEEE Micro’s annual “Top Picks” issue. At Princeton, Manerkar received the Wallace Memorial Fellowship, one of Princeton’s highest graduate honors awarded to approximately 25 PhD students annually for a senior year of their doctoral studies. He also received the 2019 Award for Excellence from Princeton’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, and was a finalist for the Schmidt Science Fellows class of 2020.