Profile photo of Your Name

Yiwei Zhao

Ph.D. Student in Electrical and Computer Engineering

Carnegie Mellon University

Parallel Data Lab & CMU Parlay Lab

yiweiz3 [at] andrew [dot] cmu [dot] edu

I am a final-year Ph.D. student at CMU, advised by Prof. Phillip B. Gibbons. Prior to that, I received my Bachelor's degree from 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.

I design faster and more efficient computer systems and architecture. My research focuses on cross-stack co-design for emerging hardware systems---recently centered on Processing-in-Memory---spanning 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.

Scholar LinkedIn CV

News

Feb 2026 I will be on the job market this year. Please feel free to reach out!
Jan 2026 Our paper on PIM-zd-tree will appear in PPoPP'26.
Nov 2025 Our PIM-tree paper has been invited to a special issue of the VLDB Journal featuring outstanding papers from VLDB'23.
Oct 2025 I was invited to give a talk at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at UC Berkeley, as part of the workshop on Algorithmic Foundations for Emerging Computing Technologies.

Education

Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering

Carnegie Mellon University

2021 – Present

Advisor: Prof. Phillip B. Gibbons

B.E. in Electronic Engineering

Tsinghua University

2017 – 2021

Graduated with Highest Honor

Selected Publications

* denotes equal contribution

  1. Paper thumbnail

    PIM-zd-tree: A Fast Space-Partitioning Index Leveraging Processing-In-Memory

    Yiwei Zhao, Hongbo Kang, Ziyang Men, Yan Gu, Guy E. Blelloch, Laxman Dhulipala, Charles McGuffey, Phillip B. Gibbons.

    PPoPP 31st ACM SIGPLAN Annual Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming, 2026

    [Paper] [Code]
  2. Paper thumbnail

    Optimal Batch-Dynamic kd-trees for Processing-In-Memory with Applications

    Yiwei Zhao, Hongbo Kang, Yan Gu, Guy E. Blelloch, Laxman Dhulipala, Charles McGuffey, Phillip B. Gibbons.

    SPAA 37th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures, 2025

    [Paper]
  3. Paper thumbnail

    No Cap, This Memory Slaps: Breaking Through the Memory Wall of Transactional Database Systems with Processing-in-Memory

    Hyoungjoo Kim, Yiwei Zhao, Andrew Pavlo, Phillip B. Gibbons.

    VLDB Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, Vol.18, No.11, 2025

    [Paper] [Code]
  4. Paper thumbnail

    H4H: Hybrid Convolution-Transformer Architecture Search for NPU-CIM Heterogeneous Systems for AR/VR Applications

    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, Ziyun Li.

    ASP-DAC 30th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference, 2025

    [Paper] [arXiv] [Slides] [HOPC'25]
  5. Paper thumbnail

    PIM-trie: A Skew-Resistant Trie for Processing-in-Memory

    Hongbo Kang, Yiwei Zhao, Guy E. Blelloch, Laxman Dhulipala, Yan Gu, Charles McGuffey, Phillip B. Gibbons.

    SPAA 35th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures, 2023

    [Paper]
  6. Paper thumbnail

    PIM-tree: A Skew-resistant Index for Processing-in-Memory

    Hongbo Kang, Yiwei Zhao, Guy E. Blelloch, Laxman Dhulipala, Yan Gu, Charles McGuffey, Phillip B. Gibbons.

    VLDB Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, Vol.16, No.4, 2023

    [Paper] [arXiv] [Code] [HOPC'23] [VLDBJ'25]

    Best Paper Runner-up in VLDB 2023.

Awards