Nika Mansouri Ghiasi

I am currently a senior researcher in the SAFARI Research Group at ETH Zurich, where I recently defended my PhD thesis, advised by Prof. Onur Mutlu.

My research is in computer architecture, systems, and computational biology. My work tackles issues in and across storage and memory systems, emerging technologies such as dense 3D integration, and data intensive applications needed for advancing health and life sciences. I am especially excited about designing high-performance, energy-efficient, and low-cost systems for (i) widespread adoption of data-intensive applications in healthcare and life sciences and (ii) enabling new solutions that were out of reach before.

Along my research, I lead the organization of the Architecture for Health (Arch4Health) initiative with the goal of exploring the key computational challenges in health-related applications and the vital role of computer architecture in overcoming them.

During my PhD, I spent one semester as a visiting researcher at the Robust Systems Group at Stanford University, working with Prof. Subhasish Mitra. Before my PhD I obtained my master's degree from ETH Zurich, advised by Prof. Onur Mutlu, and my bachelor's degree from the University of Tehran, advised by Prof. Ali Afzali-Kusha and Dr. Mehdi Kamal.

Awards & Recognitions

2026 To be inducted into the ISCA Hall of Fame.
2026 Selected to participate in the 13th Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF), as one of 20 young researchers presenting at the forum.
2024 Grand Finalist, ACM Student Research Competition held at the International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT).
2022 Recipient of the ETH Zurich Doc.Mobility Fellowship.
2016 Ranked among the top 10% of the electrical engineering students of the University of Tehran.
2011 – 2016 Awarded the University of Tehran Fellowship for BSc.
2011 Ranked in the top 0.1% among more than 280,000 students in Iran's National University Entrance Exam.
2010 Semifinalist at the Mathematics, Chemistry, and Literature National Olympiads.
Member of the National Organization for Development of Exceptional Talents (NODET) during middle and high school.

News

June 2026 To be inducted into the ISCA Hall of Fame in 2026.
May 2026 "Towards a decentralized future for open-science databases" is accepted to Nature Genetics Comments, 2026.
April 2026 Selected to participate in the 13th Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) 2026.
March 2026 Defended my PhD thesis, "Storage-Centric System Designs for Enabling Fast, Efficient, and Low-Cost Genomic and Metagenomic Analyses." More info.
March 2026 GRAINS is accepted to ISCA 2026.
March 2026 RevaMp3D is accepted to ACM TACO 2026.
January 2026 We organized the second Arch4Health workshop in conjunction with HPCA 2026 in Sydney, Australia. Workshop page.
November 2025 SAGe is accepted to HPCA 2026.

Earlier news

November 2025 Conduit is accepted to HPCA 2026.
November 2025 GenPairX is accepted to HPCA 2026.
October 2025 We organized the first Arch4Health workshop in conjunction with MICRO 2025 in Seoul, South Korea. Workshop page.
April 2025 MARS is accepted to ICS 2025.
March 2025 REIS is accepted to ISCA 2025.
March 2025 IMPACT is accepted to DSN 2025.
January 2025 "Analysis of metagenomic data" is published in Nature Reviews Methods Primers, 2025.
November 2024 Presented "Specializing the Storage System for Genomics and Metagenomics" at CWIDCA and the PIM Tutorial, in conjunction with MICRO 2024.
November 2024 Presented "Storage-Centric Computing for Genomics and Metagenomics" at AMD, Austin.
November 2024 Ariadne is accepted to HPCA 2025.
October 2024 Presented "Storage-Centric Computing for Genomics and Metagenomics" at UCLA (host: Prof. Tony Nowatzki) and UCI (host: Prof. Alex Veidenbaum).
October 2024 ACM SRC Grand Finalist for "Understanding and Modeling the Performance Landscape of Ultra-Dense 3D Memory Systems" at PACT SRC 2024, in collaboration with Prof. Subhasish Mitra (Stanford), Prof. Tathagata Srimani (CMU), and their research groups.
June 2024 Presented MegIS at ISCA 2024.

Selected Publications

Research summary and initiative papers

Nika Mansouri Ghiasi*, Konstantina Koliogeorgi*, Onur Mutlu

Architecture for Health Initiative (Arch4Health): Computational Challenges in Health-Related Applications and the Role of Computer Architecture in Addressing Them

In ACM International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS) Workshops, 2026
Nika Mansouri Ghiasi, Onur Mutlu

Enabling Fast, Efficient, and Low-Cost Genomic and Metagenomic Analyses via Storage-Centric System Designs

In ACM International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS) Workshops, 2026

Featured

Nika Mansouri Ghiasi, Harun Mustafa, Talu Güloglu, Rakesh Nadig, Konstantina Koliogeorgi, Susana Rebolledo Ruiz, Marc Rautmann, Furkan Eris, Mohammad Sadrosadati, Jisung Park, Onur Mutlu

GRAINS: Enabling High-Performance and Low-Cost Graph-Based Genome Analysis via Storage-Aware Algorithm-Architecture Co-Design

In International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), 2026
Nika Mansouri Ghiasi, Talu Güloglu, Harun Mustafa, Can Firtina, Konstantina Koliogeorgi, Konstantinos Kanellopoulos, Haiyu Mao, Rakesh Nadig, Mohammad Sadrosadati, Jisung Park, Onur Mutlu

SAGe: A Lightweight Algorithm-Architecture Co-Design for Mitigating the Data Preparation Bottleneck in Large-Scale Genome Sequence Analysis

In International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA), 2026
Nika Mansouri Ghiasi, Mohammad Sadrosadati, Geraldo F. Oliveira, Konstantinos Kanellopoulos, Rachata Ausavarungnirun, Juan Gómez-Luna, João Dinis Ferreira, Jeremie S. Kim, Christina Giannoula, Nandita Vijaykumar, Jisung Park, Onur Mutlu

RevaMp3D: Architecting the Processor Core and Cache Hierarchy for Systems with Monolithically-Integrated Logic and Memory

In ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization (TACO), 2026
Gaurav Sharma, Viorel Munteanu, Nika Mansouri Ghiasi, Utkarsha Mahanta, Jineta Banerjee, Susheel Varma, Luca Foschini, Kyle Ellrott, Onur Mutlu, Dumitru Ciorbă, Roel A. Ophoff, Viorel Bostan, Jason H. Moore, Despoina Sousoni, Arunkumar Krishnan, Alexander G. Lucaci, Alba Tull, Christopher E. Mason, Mihai Dimian, Gustavo Stolovitzky, Fabio G. Liberante, Taras K. Oleksyk, Serghei Mangul

Towards a decentralized future for open-science databases

In Nature Genetics, 2026
Rakesh Nadig, Vamanan Arulchelvan, Mayank Kabra, Harshita Gupta, Rahul Bera, Nika Mansouri Ghiasi, Nanditha Rao, Qingcai Jiang, Andreas Kosmas Kakolyris, Yu Liang, Mohammad Sadrosadati, Onur Mutlu

Conduit: Programmer-Transparent Near-Data Processing Using Multiple Compute-Capable Resources in SSDs

In International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA), 2026
Kangqi Chen, Rakesh Nadig, Andreas Kosmas Kakolyris, Manos Frouzakis, Nika Mansouri Ghiasi, Yu Liang, Haiyu Mao, Jisung Park, Mohammad Sadrosadati, Onur Mutlu

REIS: A High-Performance and Energy-Efficient Retrieval System with In-Storage Processing

In International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), 2025
Shaopeng Liu, Judith S. Rodriguez, Viorel Munteanu, Cynthia Ronkowski, Nitesh Kumar Sharma, Mohammed Alser, Francesco Andreace, Ran Blekhman, Dagmara Błaszczyk, Rayan Chikhi, Keith A. Crandall, Katja Della Libera, Dallace Francis, Alina Frolova, Abigail Shahar Gancz, Naomi E. Huntley, Pooja Jaiswal, Tomasz Kosciolek, Pawel P. Łabaj, Wojciech Łabaj, Tu Luan, Christopher Mason, Ahmed M. Moustafa, Harihara Subrahmaniam Muralidharan, Onur Mutlu, Nika Mansouri Ghiasi, Ali Rahnavard, Fengzhu Sun, Shuchang Tian, Braden T. Tierney, Emily Van Syoc, Riccardo Vicedomini, Joseph P. Zackular, Alex Zelikovsky, Kinga Zielińska, Erika Ganda, Emily R. Davenport, Mihai Pop, David Koslicki, Serghei Mangul

Analysis of metagenomic data

In Nature Reviews Methods Primers, 2025
Nika Mansouri Ghiasi, Mohammad Sadrosadati, Harun Mustafa, Arvid Gollwitzer, Can Firtina, Julien Eudine, Haiyu Mao, Joël Lindegger, Meryem Banu Cavlak, Mohammed Alser, Jisung Park, Onur Mutlu

MegIS: High-Performance, Energy-Efficient, and Low-Cost Metagenomic Analysis with In-Storage Processing

In International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), 2024
Nika Mansouri Ghiasi, Onur Mutlu

Understanding and Modeling the Performance Landscape of Ultra-Dense 3D Memory Systems

In ACM Student Research Competition at the International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT SRC), 2024
Rakesh Nadig, Mohammad Sadrosadati, Haiyu Mao, Nika Mansouri Ghiasi, Arash Tavakkol, Jisung Park, Hamid Sarbazi-Azad, Juan Gómez-Luna, Onur Mutlu

Venice: Improving Solid-State Drive Parallelism at Low Cost via Conflict-Free Accesses

In International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), 2023
Can Firtina, Nika Mansouri Ghiasi, Joël Lindegger, Gagandeep Singh, Meryem Banu Cavlak, Haiyu Mao, Onur Mutlu

RawHash: Enabling Fast and Accurate Real-Time Analysis of Raw Nanopore Signals for Large Genomes

In Annual Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology and European Conference on Computational Biology (ISMB/ECCB), 2023
Nika Mansouri Ghiasi, Jisung Park, Harun Mustafa, Jeremie S. Kim, Ataberk Olgun, Arvid Gollwitzer, Damla Senol Cali, Can Firtina, Haiyu Mao, Nour Almadhoun Alserr, Rachata Ausavarungnirun, Nandita Vijaykumar, Mohammed Alser, Onur Mutlu

GenStore: A High-Performance In-Storage Processing System for Genome Sequence Analysis

In International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), 2022
Nika Mansouri Ghiasi, Nandita Vijaykumar, Geraldo F. Oliveira, Lois Orosa, Ivan Fernandez, Mohammad Sadrosadati, Konstantinos Kanellopoulos, Nastaran Hajinazar, Juan Gómez-Luna, Onur Mutlu

ALP: Alleviating CPU-Memory Data Movement Overheads in Memory-Centric Systems

In IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing (IEEE TETC), 2022

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