Sagar Karandikar

Sagar Karandikar is an Assistant Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) department at UC Berkeley and the Jean and Hing Wong Foundation Faculty Fellow. He is also a Visiting Faculty Researcher at Google. His research focuses on hardware/software co-design for hyperscale cloud data centers powering critical applications including AI/ML, scalable data processing, and web services.

His educational background includes:

• Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley (2024)
• M.S. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley (2018)
• B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from UC Berkeley (2015)

Dr. Karandikar's research spans hardware accelerator and server system-on-chip design, full-stack system optimization, and agile, open-source hardware development methodologies. His work addresses system-level inefficiencies in warehouse-scale computers through data-driven hardware/software co-design. His group is part of the SpeciaLIzed Computing Ecosystems (SLICE) Lab at Berkeley.

His publications reveal a consistent focus on improving hyperscale datacenter performance through hardware acceleration and system optimization. Key themes include FPGA-accelerated simulation (FireSim), hardware accelerators for specific workloads (like protocol buffers and compression), and open-source frameworks for agile hardware development (Chipyard). His work bridges the gap between theoretical architecture research and practical deployment in large-scale datacenters.

Dr. Karandikar has received numerous prestigious awards for his research:

• 2025 ACM SIGARCH/IEEE CS TCCA Outstanding Dissertation Award
• ISCA@50 25-year Retrospective selection
• IEEE Micro Top Picks selection and honorable mention
• MICRO and ISCA Distinguished Artifact Awards
• David J. Sakrison Memorial Prize for outstanding graduate research
• UC Berkeley Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award
• DARPA Riser selection

Dr. Karandikar actively mentors students and leads research projects including FireSim (used in over 70 peer-reviewed publications from institutions worldwide), Hyperscale SoC, and Chipyard. His work has been adopted by both academic institutions and industry for developing commercially available chips and as standard platforms for DARPA/IARPA programs. He is accepting new students for his research group.

His research group is part of the SpeciaLIzed Computing Ecosystems (SLICE) Lab at Berkeley, focusing on hardware/software co-design for hyperscale cloud systems. The group develops frameworks like FireSim for FPGA-accelerated cycle-accurate simulation and Chipyard for agile RISC-V SoC design, enabling rapid prototyping and evaluation of specialized computing systems.