Sagar Karandikar: Faculty Home Page

Biography

Sagar Karandikar is an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) at UC Berkeley and the Jean and Hing Wong Foundation Faculty Fellow at UC Berkeley.

His research focuses on hardware/software co-design for hyperscale cloud data centers that power critical and rapidly evolving applications including AI/ML, scalable data processing, web services, and more. His group works on areas including hardware accelerator and server system-on-chip design, full-stack (HW + SW) system optimization and profiling, and agile, open-source, AI/ML-infused hardware development methodologies. His group is part of the SpeciaLIzed Computing Ecosystems (SLICE) Lab at Berkeley.

His work has received several recognitions, including an ISCA@50 25-year Retrospective selection, an IEEE Micro Top Picks selection, an IEEE Micro Top Picks honorable mention, a MICRO Distinguished Artifact Award, an ISCA Distinguished Artifact Award, and more. His work is also widely used in the community. For example, FireSim has been used (not only cited) in over 70 peer-reviewed publications from first authors at over 30 institutions, in the development of commercially available chips, and as a standard host platform for DARPA/IARPA programs.

He received the 2025 ACM SIGARCH/IEEE CS TCCA Outstanding Dissertation Award for “advancing the state-of-the-art in agile hardware/software co-design tools and deploying them at a hyperscaler to architect custom hardware that eliminates costly system-level WSC inefficiencies.” He also received the David J. Sakrison Memorial Prize for outstanding graduate research, the UC Berkeley Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, and was selected as a DARPA Riser.