About Me

Hi, I am a third year PhD student at EPFL, Switzerland working on confidential computing in the Data Center Systems Laboratory DCSL advised by Prof. Edouard Bugnion. Before that, I was a master's student at IIT Kanpur, India where I worked on hardware cache prefetching and was advised by Dr. Biswabandan Panda. During my master's, I was an intern at Intel Labs, Bangalore for six months where I worked with Dr. Niranjan Soundararajan on optimizing different aspects in the processor pipeline. Find more details on my research here and my CV here.

Publications and Patents

Creating Trust by Abolishing Hierarchies.
HotOS 2023
Charly Castes, Adrien Ghosn, Neelu S. Kalani, Yuchen Qian, Marios Kogias, Mathias Payer and Edouard Bugnion

A RISC-V Extension to Minimize Privileges of Enclave Runtimes.
SysTEX @ EuroSys 2023
Neelu S. Kalani and Edouard Bugnion

Embracing Homogeneity in Root of Trust Establishment.
SysDW @ SOSP 2023
Neelu S. Kalani

Caching based on Branch Instructions in a Processor.
US Patent US2023/0103206A1
Niranjan Soundararajan, Sreenivas Subramoney, Neelu S. Kalani, Vishal Gupta

Instruction Criticality based Energy-efficient Hardware Data Prefetching.
IEEE CAL 2021
Neelu S. Kalani and Biswabandan Panda

Run-Jump-Run: Bouquet of Instruction Pointer Jumpers for High Performance Instruction Prefetching.
IPC @ ISCA 2020
Vishal Gupta, Neelu S. Kalani and Biswabandan Panda

Mentoring Students

Establishing Dynamic Root of Trust for RISC-V
Student: Alexandre Meïer Doukhan
Bachelor Thesis

Providing Remote Attestation for Trust Domains
Student: Pavle Janevski
Summer@EPFL Internship

Teaching

The following is a list of the courses I’ve TAed so far. My teaching duties generally revolve around conducting interactive exercise sessions, conducting lab sessions, and preparing quizzes/exercises, etc.

Computer Security, EPFL
Prof. Carmela Troncoso (Fall 2023) and Prof. Edouard Bugnion (Fall 2022)

Advanced Topics on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, EPFL
Prof. Carmela Troncoso (Spring 2023)

Fundamentals of Computing (Head TA), IIT Kanpur
Prof. Debadatta Mishra (Spring 2021) and Prof. Piyush Rai (Fall 2019)

Computer Architecture , IIT Kanpur
Prof. Biswabandan Panda (Spring 2020)

Invited Talks

The following is a list of the talks I’ve given so far. I’ve also put the links to the slides/posters in case you are interested. 😄

A RISC-V Extension to Minimize Privileges of Enclave Runtimes
SysTEX @ EuroSys 2023

Embracing Homogeneity in Root of Trust Establishment
Lightning Talk at SysDW @ SOSP 2023

Putting the Spotlight on Root of Trust
Workshop focused on New Software Abstractions for Hardware Security Technology held at Monte Verità, Ascona, 2023

Instruction Criticality-based Energy-efficient Hardware Data Prefetching
ACM Student Research Competition @ MICRO 2021 (I won the 2nd prize ☺️)

Run-Jump-Run: Bouquet of Instruction Pointer Jumpers for High Performance Instruction Prefetching
Poster at CWWMCA @ MICRO 2020

Time for Consonant Memory Wall Killers
Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QIF) India 2020 Finalist Talk

Extra-curricular

EPFL graduate student association member (called EPIC)
Since 2022.

Volunteer for winter school
Conducted a demo and lab session for the computer architecture winter school 2020 (CAWS) on the ChampSim simulator.

Hobbies

I enjoy watching Netflix and reading. When I was younger (don’t we all miss those days), I used to write sort of a philosophical blog. 😁

Contact

Email: neelu.kalani@epfl.ch
Office: INN 235 at EPFL Campus, Lausanne, Switzerland