UBC CIRRUS Lab

Welcome to the UBC CIRRUS Lab

Cloud computing plays an integral role as the backbone of today's IT-driven society. The immense scale of cloud computing systems, its wide range of users and enabled applications, and complex interactions between numerous services and software layers make it easy to leave efficiency behind. The UBC Cloud Infrastructure Research for Reliability, Usability, and Sustainability (CIRRUS) Lab was born in July 2021 to tackle existing cloud computing challenges and drive future technologies for the next generation of cloud services.

Team

	Mohammad Shahrad Assistant Professor [Principal Investigator]
Changyuan Lin PhD Student (NSERC CGS D scholar)	Nima Nasiri MASc Student	Daniel Long MASc Student
MohammadAmin Baqershahi MASc Student	Hanan Awwad MASc Student (starting 1/1/25)	Shuo Zhang MASc Student
	Visal Saosuo Undergraduate Student

Open Positions

Former Members

Recent Lab News

News History

Publications and Preprints

Growlithe: A Developer-Centric Compliance Tool for Serverless Applications
P. Gupta, A. Moghimi, D. Sisodraker, M. Shahrad, and A. Mehta
46th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P '25)
The Sunk Carbon Fallacy: Rethinking Carbon Footprint Metrics for Effective Carbon-Aware Scheduling
N. Bashir, V. Gohil, A. B. Subramanya, M. Shahrad, D. Irwin, E. Olivetti, and C. Delimitrou
15th ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC '24)
Caribou: Fine-Grained Geospatial Shifting of Serverless Applications for Sustainability
V. Gsteiger, P. H. Long, Y. Sun, P. Javanrood, and M. Shahrad
30th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP '24)
Bridging the Sustainability Gap in Serverless through Observability and Carbon-Aware Pricing
C. Lin and M. Shahrad
3rd Workshop on Sustainable Computer Systems (HotCarbon '24)
Zenix: Efficient Execution of Bulky Serverless Applications
Z. Guo, Z. Blanco, J. Chen, J. Li, Z. Wei, B. Dong, I. Pota, M. Shahrad, H. Xu, and Y. Zhang
arXiv:2206.13444v3 (2023)
Parrotfish: Parametric Regression for Optimizing Serverless Functions
A. Moghimi, J. Hattori, A. Li, M. Ben Chikha, and M. Shahrad
14th ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC '23)
UnFaaSener: Latency and Cost Aware Offloading of Functions from Serverless Platforms
G. Sadeghian, M. Elsakhawy, M. Shahrad, J. Hattori, and M. Shahrad
2023 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC '23)
VectorVisor: A Binary Translation Scheme for Throughput-Oriented GPU Acceleration
S. Ginzburg, M. Shahrad, and M. Freedman
2023 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC '23)
On Merits and Viability of Multi-Cloud Serverless
A. Fatahi Baarzi, G. Kesidis, C. Joe-Wong, and M. Shahrad
12th ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC '21)
Provisioning Differentiated Last-Level Cache Allocations to VMs in Public Clouds
M. Shahrad, S. Elnikety, and R. Bianchini
12th ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC '21)

Here are Dr. Shahrad's selected papers prior to establishing the CIRRUS lab. Find his complete publication list here.

Serverless in the Wild: Characterizing and Optimizing the Serverless Workload at a Large Cloud Provider
M. Shahrad, R. Fonseca, I. Goiri, G. Chaudhry, P. Batum, J. Cooke, E. Laureano, C. Tresness, M. Russinovich, and R. Bianchini
2020 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC '20)
Architectural Implications of Function-as-a-Service Computing
M. Shahrad, J. Balkind, and D. Wentzlaff
IEEE/ACM 52nd International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO '19)

Featured Open-Source Systems and Tools

Caribou: Caribou is a framework for geo-distributed deployment of serverless workflows to save carbon emissions.
Star Fork
Parrotfish: A powerful open-source tool to efficiently tune serverless functions and workflows for cost and performance. It is faster and more accurate than the other tools.
Star Fork
UnFaaSener: A system to automatically offload serverless functions off of serverless platforms, offering significant cost savings.
Star Fork
VectorVisor: A binary translator that simplifies running many copies of single-threaded programs in parallel using GPUs.
Star Fork
FaaSProfiler: An open source tool for testing and profiling FaaS and serverless platforms.
Star Fork

Research Enablers

We are grateful for the grants, gifts, resources, and partnerships that have empowered our research endeavors.