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On the ACADEMIC JOB MARKET: I am currently seeking a tenure-track faculty position. You can take a look at my CV and Research Statement for a closer look at my background and contributions. You can also access my Teaching Statement and Diversity Statement. I am always excited to share my work with potential colleagues and collaborators. If your department is hiring or if you are interested in learning more about my work, let’s talk!

I am the Computing & Climate Impact Fellow at MIT Climate & Sustainability Consortium (MCSC) and a postdoc with Christina Delimitrou at MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

I work on improving the sustainability of computing and AI. I demonstrate that the status quo approach to computing sustainability, i.e., the lone focus on improving energy efficiency, is insufficient to tackle the emerging dynamics of saturating efficiency gains, exponential growth in computing demand, and electricity availability constraints. To solve this problem, I design systems, algorithms, and metrics that elevate sustainability to a first-class objective in computer system design and operation.

I have made fundamental contributions to the design of sustainable computer systems through multiple artifacts, such as EcoVisor, CarbonContainers, CarbonScaler, and WattScope. One of my solutions to improving resource efficiency in datacenters is deployed on all the Google datacenters serving applications such as Google Search, Gmail, and YouTube.

Before joining MIT, I was at UMass Amherst for 7+ years working with Prashant Shenoy as a postdoc and completing my PhD in Computer Engineering (2022) at the Sustainable Computing Lab with David Irwin. During my PhD, I worked as a Student Researcher on Google’s Borg Scheduler mentored by Nan Deng and Krzysztof Rządca. I also worked at VMWare Research Group on Computing Sustainability Benchmarking.

Before joining UMass, I worked as a Research Assistant at the Advanced Communication Lab at LUMS, Pakistan, and Systems & Networks Lab at NUCES-NU, Pakistan. I did my MS in Energy Systems Engineering from Center for Advanced Studies in Energy at NUST, Pakistan and BS in Electrical (Power) Engineering at UET Lahore, Pakistan.

I take a huge pride academic service and was recognized as one of the top three reviewers at ACM e-Energy’23.

Selected Publications

  1. SoCC 2024
    "The Sunk Carbon Fallacy: Rethinking Carbon Footprint Metrics for Effective Carbon-Aware Scheduling" -- Noman Bashir, Varun Gohil, Mohammad Shahrad, David Irwin, Anagha B. Subramanya, Elsa Olivetti, and Christina Delimitrou -- ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC) , 2024. PDF
  2. EuroSys 2024
    "On the Limitations of Carbon-Aware Temporal and Spatial Workload Shifting in the Cloud" -- Thanathorn Sukprasert, Abel Souza, Noman Bashir, David Irwin, and Prashant Shenoy -- European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys) , 2024. PDF
  3. ASPLOS 2024
    "Going Green for Less Green: Optimizing the Cost of Reducing Cloud Carbon Emissions" -- Walid Hanafy, Qianlin Liang, Noman Bashir, Abel Souza, David Irwin, and Prashant Shenoy -- ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS) , 2024. PDF
  4. ICML 2024
    "Chasing Convex Functions with Long-term Constraints" -- Adam Lechowicz, Nicolas Christianson, Bo Sun, Noman Bashir, Mohammad Hajiesmaili, Adam Wierman, and Prashant Shenoy -- The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) , 2024. PDF
  5. SIGMETRICS 2024
    "CarbonScaler: Leveraging Cloud Workload Elasticity for Optimizing Carbon-Efficiency" -- Walid Hanafy, Qianlin Liang, Noman Bashir, David Irwin, and Prashant Shenoy -- ACM SIGMETRICS/IFIP PERFORMANCE Joint International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems (SIGMETRICS) , 2024. Awarded PDF
  6. ASPLOS 2023
    "Ecovisor: A Virtual Energy System for Carbon-Efficient Applications" -- Abel Souza, Noman Bashir, Jorge Murillo, Walid Hanafy, Qianlin Liang, David E. Irwin, and Prashant J. Shenoy -- ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS) , 2023. arXiv Bib PDF
  7. e-Energy 2023
    "Jointly Managing Electrical and Thermal Energy in Solar- and Battery-powered Computer Systems" -- Noman Bashir, Yasra Chandio, David Irwin, Fatima M. Anwar, Jeremy Gummeson, and Prashant Shenoy -- ACM International Conference on Future and Sustainable Energy Systems (e-Energy) , 2023. PDF
  8. EuroSys 2021
    "Take it to the Limit: Peak Prediction-driven Resource Overcommitment in datacenters" -- Noman Bashir, Nan Deng, Krzysztof Rzadca, David Irwin, Sree Kodak, and Rohit Jnagal -- European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys) , 2021. PDF

Latest News

11/19/2024: I will give an invited talk titled “Enable Sustainable Datacenters by Virtualizing Energy Systems” at Harvard SEAS on December 3, 2024.
09/25/2024: My paper titled The Sunk Carbon Fallacy: Rethinking Carbon Footprint Metrics for Effective Carbon-Aware Scheduling has been accepted to ACM SoCC 2024.
09/08/2024: I, with Prof. Elsa Olivetti, received a Nokia research grant of $57,000 for our research on Provisioning and Operating Sustainable Datacenters.
07/25/2024: I will be talking about the climate and sustainability implications of generative AI at 2024 MIT ILP Sustainability Conference on October 22, 2024.
06/25/2024: Our paper CarbonScaler: Leveraging Cloud Workload Elasticity for Optimizing Carbon-Efficiency won the Best Student Paper Award at ACM SIGMETRICS 2024.