Yanwen Xu

Ph.D. Candidate in CSE @ UC Santa Cruz && GPU Engineer @ Samsung

👋 Hi

I am a final-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), supervised by Professor Tyler Sorensen. I recently joined Samsung as a GPU Engineer.

My research interests include:

heterogeneous computing
programming languages
compilers

I am particularly interested in accelerating workloads on tightly coupled CPU-accelerator (e.g., GPU/FPGA) systems, with the aim of realizing the full potential of these architectures. I also believe that programmers deserve better tools for developing heterogeneous applications; this fuels my exploration of novel compiler techniques and programming language features. You can find more details in my research projects and publications.

struct Research {
    // Tightly-coupled CPU + {GPU, FPGA, TPU}
    using Architecture = Heterogeneous<UnifiedMemory>;

    void optimize() {
        Compiler::bridge(HighLevelPL, PeakPerformance);
    }

    auto goal = "Unleash full hardware potential";
};

Before starting my Ph.D., I was an indie game developer, and many of my game projects are featured in my portfolio. Aside from academia, I am a competitive fencing (🤺) athlete and a certified coach. I earned my Instructor at Arms in Foil diploma in 2022 and Provost at Arms in 2024.

BTW: My favorite Linux distro is Fedora, my favorite DE is XFCE4, and my favorite processor is AMD EPYC.

📣 Latest News

Oct 2025 — I presented BetterTogether at IISWC'25. Our work received the Best Paper Award! 🏆
Sep 2025 — I joined the Samsung Advanced Computing Lab full-time!
Aug 2025 — Our work BetterTogether was accepted for publication at IISWC'25.
Apr 2024 — I started a research internship at Mercedes-Benz R&D North America.
May 2023 — Successfully advanced to Ph.D. Candidacy! ✅
Jun 2023 — I gave a virtual talk on Redwood at OSCAR’23.
Apr 2023 — I presented Redwood at ISPASS’23.