Mahbod Afarin

Mahbod Afarin

Postdoctoral Scholar

University of California San Diego

Hi, I am Mahbod. I am currently a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California, San Diego, working in the System Energy Efficiency (SEE) Lab and the Processing with Intelligence Storage and Memory (PRISM) Research Center under the supervision of Professor Tajana Rosing. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Univesity of Califronia, Riverside under the supervision of Professor Rajiv Gupta and Professor Nael Abu-Ghazaleh. Prior to that, I earned my M.Sc. in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, where I was advised by Professor Shaahin Hessabi.

My research interests include hardware accelerators, compiler optimizations, graph analytics, & computer architecture . During my Ph.D., I developed frameworks that accelerate graph processing workloads by combining hardware and algorithmic innovations. These frameworks exploit parallelism and eliminate redundancy to improve scalability and performance. I also enjoy working on computer architecture and compiler optimization projects. My research has been published in top-tier conferences, including MICRO, ASPLOS, and EuroSys. Outside of computer science, I enjoy reading history and literature.

Interests
  • Computer Architecture
  • Hardware Accelerators
  • Compiler Optimizations
  • Graph Processing
  • FPGA Design
  • GPU Programming
  • Machine Learning
Education

  • Postdoc in Computer Science, 2026

    University of California San Diego

  • PhD in Computer Science, 2025

    University of California Riverside

  • MSc in Computer Engineering, 2018

    Sharif University of Technology

Recent News

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News

  • [01/2026] Paper accepted: UVVs: Identifying Unchanged Vertex Values in Evolving Graphs via Intersection–Union Analysis, IEEE IPDPS 2026.

  • [11/2025] I presented a poster on Compiler Support for Dynamic Programming Hardware Accelerators at the Processing with Intelligent Storage and Memory (PRISM) Annual Review 2025.

  • [6/2025] Started my Postdoctoral Scholar at UC San Diego in the System Energy Efficiency (SEE) Lab and Processing with Intelligence Storage and Memory (PRISM) Research Center, supervised by Professor Tajana Rosing.

  • [6/2025] I have successfully defended my Ph.D. dissertation titled “Redundancy Removal for Accelerating Graph Processing Workloads.” Officially a doctor now (link)!

  • [4/2025] Gave a talk on “Hardware/Software Approaches for Accelerating Graph Processing Workloads” in the School of Computing at Binghamton University.

Recent Publications

Mahbod Afarin, Chao Gao, Xizhe Yin, Zhijia Zhao, Nael Abu-Ghazaleh, Rajiv Gupta (2025). Analysis of Stable Vertex Values: Fast Query Evaluation Over An Evolving Graph. arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.10579.

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Xiaolin Jiang, Mahbod Afarin, Zhijia Zhao, Nael Abu-Ghazaleh, Rajiv Gupta (2024). Core Graph: Exploiting Edge Centrality to Speedup the Evaluation of Iterative Graph Queries. EuroSys24: Proceedings of the Nineteenth European Conference on Computer Systems (Contributed Equally with the First Author) (Acceptance Rate: 15.99%) .

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Abbas Mazloumi, Mahbod Afarin, Rajiv Gupta (2023). Expressway: Prioritizing Edges for Distributed Evaluation of Graph Queries. 2023 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData).

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Recent Teachings

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Teaching Experience

  • [Summer 2023] TA - Compiler Design, UC Riverside.

        → Numerical Evaluation | Comments

Recent Services

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Peer Review

  • Review activity for ACM transactions on architecture and code optimization.

  • Review activity for IEEE computer architecture letters.

  • Review activity for Parallel computing.

Artifact Evaluation Committee

  • International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS'25).

  • International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS'24).

  • International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA'24).

Recent Awards

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Academic Awards

  • Won the UCR Dissertation Completion Fellowship Award at UC Riverside in 2024.

  • Received the Excellent Service badge in all three cycles of ASPLOS’24 Artifact Evaluation at ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, San Diego, 2024 (Certificate of Appreciation).

  • Won UCR GSA Travel Grant Award at University of California, Riverside, 2023.

  • Won Dean’s Distinguished Fellowship Award at University of California, Riverside, 2019.

  • Ranked 7th in terms of total GPA among 83 Computer Engineering students in Sharif University of Technology (Top 8%), 2018.

  • 1st Rank, Achievement of the highest GPA in B.Sc among all Computer Engineering graduated students, 2015.

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