Sagar Karandikar

Sagar is an incoming Assistant Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences department at UC Berkeley, starting in July 2025. Currently, he is a Visiting Faculty Researcher at Google.

His research focuses on hardware/software co-design for hyperscale cloud systems to improve hyperscale datacenter/warehouse-scale computer (WSC) performance, energy efficiency, and total cost of ownership. His work spans various areas including hardware accelerator and server system-on-chip design for hyperscale systems, system optimization and profiling, and agile, open-source hardware development methodologies.

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, the MICRO ‘21 Distinguished Artifact Award, and more. His work is also widely used in the community. For example, FireSim has been used in over 50 peer-reviewed publications, in the development of commercially available chips, and as a standard host platform for DARPA/IARPA programs. He also received the Berkeley EECS David J. Sakrison Memorial Prize for outstanding graduate research, the UC Berkeley Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor (TA) Award, and was selected as a DARPA Riser.