Samuel W. Stark

Secure FPGA Design

Designed a high-throughput cryptography accelerator for checking memory accesses at the edges of the interconnect. Verified the design using a custom C++ UVM testbench with Verilator. Integrated with a pre-existing soft-CPU interconnect design on a Stratix-10 FPGA.

Low-Level Operating System Integration

Wrote drivers and other software for interacting with the cryptography accelerator in multiple operating systems, including FreeBSD, using C, C++, Rust, and Python.

Writing and Communication

Wrote an article for ACM Queue on high-performance memory safety in CXL, which was subsequently published in Communications of the ACM - the official magazine of the world's largest scientific computing society. The article is available online.

Large-Scale Data Processing and Systems Research

Evaluated and presented research papers on many areas in large-scale data processing and cloud computing, focusing on GPU-based data processing. Profiled and replicated results from an open-source CPU/GPU stream processing research project.

RISC-V Vector Emulation & Security

Built a RISC-V CPU emulator with support for the "V" vector extension, the CHERI memory safety extension, and a combination of the two. Added support for combined instructions to Clang/LLVM, tested using C++ inline assembly. The project is available online.

High Performance CPU and GPU Programming

Achieved best-in-class (64x) speedup on a C fluid simulation with bit-for-bit accuracy using multithreading and vectorized assembly code. Moved the fluid simulation to the GPU using CUDA, with Vulkan graphics for real-time visualization, for my final-year project. The project is available online.

High Performance FPGA Design

Built a high-speed video processing filter on an FPGA using SystemVerilog with various parameters controlled in real-time from the onboard hard Arm CPU.

Machine Learning

Learned basics of classic machine learning and neural networks/deep learning.