Rate My Professor Yuanchao Xu

Yuanchao Xu is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering in the Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, a position he has held since September 2023. His research centers on computer architecture, security, computer systems, and ML systems and architecture, with a particular emphasis on improving computer memory security, reliability, and performance through vertically integrated solutions in architecture and system software. Xu received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from North Carolina State University in December 2023, advised by Dr. Xipeng Shen and Dr. Yan Solihin. He previously earned an M.S. in Computer Science from Tsinghua University in June 2018, advised by Dr. Wei Xue, and a B.S. in Software Engineering from Jilin University in June 2015. Prior to joining UCSC, he worked as a Research Assistant at NCSU from August 2018 to August 2023 and held research internships at Google Systems Research Group from May 2021 to December 2022, Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 2019, and ETH Zürich from March to September 2017.

Xu has published extensively in top-tier venues including HPCA, ISCA, ASPLOS, MICRO, and HPDC. Notable publications include "Data Enclave: A Data-Centric Trusted Execution Environment" (HPCA 2024), "FFCCD: Fence-Free Crash-Consistent Concurrent Defragmentation for Persistent Memory" (ISCA 2022), "MERR: Improving Security of Persistent Memory Objects via Efficient Memory Exposure Reduction and Randomization" (ASPLOS 2020), "ESG: Pipeline-Conscious Efficient Scheduling of DNN Workflows on Serverless Platforms with Shareable GPUs" (HPDC 2024), "SpecPMT: Speculative Logging for Resolving Crash Consistency Overhead of Persistent Memory" (ASPLOS 2023), and recent works such as "LIBRA: A High-Accuracy, Cost-Aware, and Coordinated Multi-GPU Page Prefetcher" (ISCA 2026) and "CPU-Oblivious Offloading of Failure-Atomic Transactions for Disaggregated Memory" (ASPLOS 2026). His achievements include the NSF CAREER Award, the 2024 NCSU Outstanding Dissertation Award for his thesis "Data-Centric Architecture Support for Security," and the 2021 NCSU Computer Science Outstanding Research Award. Xu has given invited talks at the University of Maryland and University of Chicago, serves on program committees for ISCA 2025, HPCA 2025, and ASPLOS 2025, and instructs Computer Architecture (CSE 120) at UCSC.