Bio

I am currently a fifth-year Ph.D. student at CMU, advised by Prof. Phillip B. Gibbons. I am supported by the Michel and Kathy Doreau Fellowship. Prior to that, I received my Bachelor's degree from the Department of Electronic Engineering in Tsinghua University with highest honor in 2021, where I was advised by Prof. Dan Pei and Prof. Yongpan Liu. I also worked as a Research Scientist Intern in Meta in 2023 and 2025, and with Prof. Julian Shun in MIT CSAIL during 2020-2021.

Research Interests

I am broadly interested in high-performance computing. My research focuses on cross-stack co-design of for emerging hardware systems across three levels: (i) algorithms and data structures, (ii) systems and architectures, and (iii) hardware and circuits. My work aims to develop general and foundational techniques for designing future hardware systems that are both theoretically grounded and practically efficient.

Publications

PIM-zd-tree: A Fast Space-Partitioning Index Leveraging Processing-In-Memory
[PPoPP'26]. Accepted by ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming. (2026)
Yiwei Zhao, Hongbo Kang, Ziyang Men, Yan Gu, Guy E. Blelloch, Laxman Dhulipala, Charles McGuffey, and Phillip B. Gibbons.
Optimal Batch-Dynamic kd-trees for Processing-In-Memory with Applications
[SPAA'25]. In 37th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures. (2025)
Yiwei Zhao, Hongbo Kang, Yan Gu, Guy E. Blelloch, Laxman Dhulipala, Charles McGuffey, and Phillip B. Gibbons.
No Cap, This Memory Slaps: Breaking Through the Memory Wall of Transactional Database Systems with Processing-in-Memory
[VLDB'25]. In Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, Vol.18, No.11. 4241-4254. (2025)
Hyoungjoo Kim, Yiwei Zhao, Andrew Pavlo, and Phillip B. Gibbons.
H4H: Hybrid Convolution-Transformer Architecture Search for NPU-CIM Heterogeneous Systems for AR/VR Applications
[ASP-DAC'25]. In 30th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference. (2025)
Yiwei Zhao, Jinhui Chen, Sai Qian Zhang, Syed Shakib Sarwar, Kleber Stangherlin, Jorge Gomez, Jae-sun Seo, Barbara De Salvo, Chiao Liu, Phillip B. Gibbons, and Ziyun Li.
PIM-trie: A Skew-Resistant Trie for Processing-in-Memory
[SPAA'23]. In 35th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures. (2023)
Hongbo Kang, Yiwei Zhao, Guy E. Blelloch, Laxman Dhulipala, Yan Gu, Charles McGuffey, and Phillip B. Gibbons.
PIM-tree: A Skew-resistant Index for Processing-in-Memory
[VLDB'23]. In Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, Vol.16, No.4. 946-958. (2023)
Best Paper Runner-up in VLDB 2023.
Hongbo Kang, Yiwei Zhao, Guy E. Blelloch, Laxman Dhulipala, Yan Gu, Charles McGuffey, and Phillip B. Gibbons.
Generic and Robust Root Cause Localization for Multi-dimensional Data in Online Service Systems
[JSS]. In Journal of Systems and Software, Vol. 203, 111748. (2023)
Zeyan Li, Junjie Chen, Yihao Chen, Chengyang Luo, Yiwei Zhao, Yongqian Sun, Kaixin Sui, Xiping Wang, Dapeng Liu, Xing Jin, Qi Wang, and Dan Pei.
Generic and Robust Localization of Multi-dimensional Root Causes
[ISSRE'19]. In IEEE 30th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering. (2019)
Zeyan Li, Chengyang Luo, Yiwei Zhao, Yongqian Sun, Kaixin Sui, Xiping Wang, Dapeng Liu, Xing Jin, Qi Wang, and Dan Pei.

Short Publications, Posters & Workshops

Neural Architecture Search of Hybrid Models for NPU-CIM Heterogeneous AR/VR Devices
[DAC'24]. In 61st Design Automation Conference. Poster session. (2024)
Yiwei Zhao, Ziyun Li, Win-San Khwa, Xiaoyu Sun, Sai Qian Zhang, Syed Shakib Sarwar, Kleber Stangherlin, Yi-Lun Lu, Jorge Gomez, Jae-sun Seo, Phillip Gibbons, Barbara De Salvo, and Chiao Liu.