David Kaeli
COE Distinguished Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Program Director, Data Science
Affiliated Faculty, Bioengineering
Affiliated Faculty, Khoury College of Computer Sciences
Office
- 333 Dana Research Center
- 617.373.5413
Research Focus
Computer architecture; GPUs; heterogeneous computing; performance analysis; security and information assurance; hardware reliability and recovery; Big Data analytics; and workload characterization
About
David Kaeli received a BS and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Rutgers University, and an MS in Computer Engineering from Syracuse University. He is presently a COE Distinguished Professor on the ECE faculty at Northeastern University, Boston, MA where he directs the Northeastern University Computer Architecture Research Laboratory (NUCAR), which is an AMD Strategic Academic Partner. Prior to joining Northeastern in 1993, Kaeli spent 12 years at IBM, the last 7 at T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY.
Dr. Kaeli is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the ACM. In 1996, he received the NSF CAREER Award. He is a member of the NIEHS-supported P42 PROTECT Center, the NSF CHEST IUCRC, and Northeastern’s Institute for Experiential Artificial Intelligence.
Education
- PhD, Rutgers University, 1992.
Honors & Awards
- 2022 Fellow, Association of Computing Machinery
- 2009 Søren Buus Outstanding Research Award
- National Science Foundation CAREER Award
- Fellow, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
- Distinguished Scientist, Association of Computing Machinery
- Distinguished Professor, College of Engineering
- Distinguished Professor, HSA Foundation
Leadership Positions
- Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization
Research Overview
Computer architecture; GPUs; heterogeneous computing; performance analysis; security and information assurance; hardware reliability and recovery; Big Data analytics; and workload characterization
Computer Architecture Research Laboratory
The Northeastern University Computer Architecture Research (NUCAR) laboratory carries out cutting-edge research in high performance, reliable and secure computing hardware and software systems. Research spans a range of topics, including hardware accelerators, heterogeneous computing, microarchitecture-level security, hardware reliability, and scalable AI/ML computing frameworks. The lab carries out use-inspired research that has been supported by the NSF, NIH, NIEHS, DARPA, ONR and AFRL, as well as many companies including AMD, NVIDIA, Intel, Dell/EMC, Samsung, Analog Devices and Qualcomm. The laboratory plays a role in a number of other centers at Northeastern, including CenSSIS, PROTECT, ALERT and CHEST.
Selected Research Projects
- Designing an Improved Information Infrastructure for Better Decision Making in Pharmaceutical Supply Chains
- – co-Principal Investigator, National Science Foundation
- Acquisition of a Heterogeneous Multi-GPU Cluster to Support Exploration at Scale
- – Principal Investigator, National Science Foundation
- Porting and Accelerating High Performance Computing Applications to the AMD ROCm Runtime Environment
– Principal Investigator, AMD - A Framework of Simultaneous Acceleration and Storage Reduction on Deep Neural Networks Using Structured Matrices
– Co-Principal Investigator, National Science Foundation - Exploring Analysis of Environment and Health Through Multiple Alternative Clustering
– Co-Principal Investigator, National Science Foundation - DARPA HIVE
– Principal Investigator, Defense Advanced Research Agency
Research Centers and Institutes
- Member
NIEHS-supported PROTECT Research Center - Member
Northeastern’s Institute for Experiential AI - Member
NSF CHEST IUCRC
Department Research Areas
Selected Publications
- T. Baruah, Y. Sun, A. Dincer, S. Mojumder, J. Abellan, Y. U., A. Josh, N. Rubin, J. Kim, D. Kaeli, “Griffin: Hardware-Software Support for Efficient Page Migration in Multi-GPU Systems,” Proceedings of the 26th IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture, 2020, 596-609.
- C. Li, Y. Sun, L. Jin, L. Xu, Z. Cao, P. Fan, D. Kaeli, S. Ma, Y. Guo, J. Yang, “Priority-Based PCIe Scheduling for Multi-Tenant Multi-GPU Systems,” IEEE Computer Architecture Letters, 18(2), 2019, 157-160.
- F. Previlon, C. Kalra, D. Tiwari, D. Kaeli, “Characterizing and Exploiting Soft Error Vulnerability Phase Behavior in GPU Applications,” IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, 2020.
- Z.H. Liang, Y. Fei, D. Kaeli, “Exploiting Bank Conflict based Side-channel Timing Leakage of GPUs,” 16(4), 2019, 1-24.
- Y. Sun, T. Baruah, S. A. Mojumder, S. Dong, X. Gong, S. Treadway, Y. Bao, S. Hance, C. McCardwell, V. Zhao, H. Barclay, A.K. Ziabari, Z. Chen, R. Ubal, J.L. Abellán, J. Kim, A. Joshi, D. Kaeli, MGPUSim: Enabling Multi-GPU Performance Modeling and Optimization, Proceedings of the 46th International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA ‘19), ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2019, 197-209
Apr 13, 2023
Northeastern University to have Strong Presence at ACM CHI 2023
The most prestigious human–computer interaction conference in the world is taking place in Hamburg, Germany this month, and researchers from Khoury College, the College of Engineering, and the College of Arts, Media and Design are ready. Their work, which touches on everything from parrot socialization to deceptive dark patterns to social media misinformation, has made […]

Sep 26, 2022
Impact Engines Spur Multidisciplinary Research Innovation to Solve Global Challenges
Northeastern University has selected its first cohort of Impact Engines to ignite measurable change in problem-solving, three of the five of which are led by engineering faculty.

Aug 25, 2022
Addressing Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Issues
MIE Associate Professor Jacqueline Griffin, ECE Professor David Kaeli, MIE Professor Ozlem Ergun, and affiliate faculty members Stacy Marsella and Casper Harteveld were awarded a $750k NSF grant for “Designing an Improved Information Infrastructure for Better Decision Making in Pharmaceutical Supply Chains.”

May 23, 2022
Computer Engineering PhD Wins Best Poster at CF22
Computer engineering student Nicolas Agostini, PhD’23, advised by ECE Professor David Kaeli, won the best poster award at the 19th ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers (CF22) for his poster on “SODA-OPT an MLIR based flow for co-design and high-level synthesis.”
May 18, 2022
Announcing Summer 2022 PEAK Experiences Awardees
Several engineering students and science students mentored by COE faculty are recipients of Northeastern’s Summer 2022 PEAK Experiences Awards.

Apr 19, 2022
Congratulations RISE: 2022 Winners
Congratulations to our engineering students who won awards at the RISE:2022 Research, Innovation and Scholarship Expo!

Jan 18, 2022
Kaeli Selected as ACM Fellow
ECE Professor David Kaeli was selected as an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow for his contributions to computer architecture and compilers.
Dec 23, 2021
COE Professors Selected in Stanford University List of Top 2% Scientists Worldwide
The following COE professors are among the top scientists worldwide selected by Stanford University representing the top 2 percent of the most-cited scientists with single-year impact in various disciplines. The selection is based on the top 100,000 by c-score (with and without self-citations) or a percentile rank of 2% or above. The list below includes […]
Oct 12, 2021
Announcing Fall 2021 PEAK Experiences Awardees
Several engineering students and science students mentored by COE faculty are recipients of Northeastern’s Fall 2021 PEAK Experiences Awards. The PEAK Experiences Awards are a progressively structured sequence of opportunities designed to support learners as they continue climbing to new heights of achievement in undergraduate research and creative endeavor throughout their Northeastern journeys. ASCENT AWARDS […]

Apr 16, 2021
Silevitch to Direct New AI Jumpstart Program
ECE Professor Michael Silevitch will lead a new Massachusetts program, AI Jumpstart, to connect small business owners in the state with academic faculty experts to learn how machine learning can grow their companies. Northeastern received a $2.2 million state grant that will be used primarily for high-speed computer equipment and also to provide for faculty consultants, both of which will be available to selected companies to get the pilot effort up and running. Northeastern kicked in an additional $2 million, raising the program’s total value to more than $4 million.