Zhenman Fang

Dr. Zhenman Fang is an Associate Professor in the School of Engineering Science (Computer Engineering Option) and Associate Member in the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University, Canada. He founded and directs the HiAccel Lab, focusing on accelerator-rich architectures. His PhD (2014) is from Fudan University, China, with 15 months spent at the University of Minnesota. Prior to SFU, he was a Staff Software Engineer at Xilinx (2017-2019) and a postdoc at UCLA (2014-2017).

His research spans:

• Hardware acceleration for ML, big data, genomics, and HPC
• FPGA-based customizable computing and near-data processing
• Compiler/runtime systems for heterogeneous platforms
• Performance/reliability optimization of accelerator-rich systems

His recent publications (2024-2025) focus on FPGA acceleration for machine learning (e.g., on-device training, quantization), computational chemistry, image/video compression, database systems, and reconfigurable computing, demonstrating cross-domain applications of specialized hardware.

Awards & Honors:

• Best Paper Awards: FPL 2024, MEMSYS 2017, TCAD 2019
• Best Paper Nominations: ICCAD 2025, FCCM 2025, HPCA 2017, ISPASS 2018
• SFU Research Excellence Horizon Award (2025)
• NSERC Alliance, CFI JELF, and Xilinx University Awards

He advises 20+ PhD/Master's students in HiAccel Lab, focusing on accelerator design. Major grants include NSERC Alliance (2020) and CFI JELF (2019). The lab operates a 10-node cluster with FPGA/GPU infrastructure.