Hongren Zheng

Education

Tsinghua University August 2022 - ?: Ph.D Student, Mingyu GAO's IDEAL Group, IIIS

Tsinghua University August 2018 - June 2022: BEng, Yao Class, IIIS; Rank: 14/57

The Fourth High School of Yongzhou, Hunan August 2015 - June 2018: Rank in Gaokao: 1st place of Hunan Province; Score: 713/750 (Chinese 125, Math 149, English 145, Science 294)

Publications

Honeycomb: Secure and Efficient GPU Executions via Static Validation

Haohui Mai, Jiacheng Zhao, Hongren Zheng, Yiyang Zhao, Zibin Liu, Mingyu Gao, Cong Wang, Huiming Cui, Xiaobing Feng, and Christos Kozyrakis

GPU Runtime: Helped code a custom AMD HIP runtime and OpenCL runtime, mainly on HIP/OpenCL API (userspace) and /dev/kfd (kernel-userspace interface, sent a PR to strace as a side product)
CPU TEE: Familiar with AMD CPU TEE techniques, e.g. SEV-SNP when dealing with CPU-GPU shared memory (modified an out-of-tree kernel module) and SVSM
Virtualization: Helped code a minified custom hypervisor (x86, in Rust) for minimal TCB
Software Engineering: Much C++ and system programming when coding user space helpers and benchmarks

OSDI'23

3M-AI: A Multi-task and Multi-core Virtualization Framework for Multi-FPGA AI Systems in the Cloud: Shulin Zeng, Guohao Dai, Hanbo Sun, Jun Liu, Hongren Zheng, Yusong Wu, Fan Zhang, Xinhao Yang, Yi Cai, Yu Wang, and Huazhong Yang; FPGA'21 (Poster)

Open Source

TUNA/BFSU Open Source Mirrors October 2020 - July 2023: Operator mirrors.tuna.tsinghua.edu.cn

CERNET Union Mirrors January 2022 - July 2023: Founder mirrors.cernet.edu.cn

OpenSSL linux-riscv platform First commit in May 2022, Role from April 2024: Nominated Community Member

Linux USB OVER IP DRIVER First commit in March 2021, Role from March 2023: Subsystem Reviewer

Experiences

Implementing RISC-V Scalar Cryptography/Bitmanip extensions in Chisel January 2022 - June 2022

Undergraduate Thesis

RTL design: Zk/Zb function unit for Rocket-Chip, upstreamed
Cryptography library: AES/SM4/SM3 assembly routine for OpenSSL, upstreamed
Up to 10X speedup for AES

Innovation Project on Self-organized IPv6 Scientific Grid Computing Spring 2020 - Spring 2021: Advised by Benda XU, Department of Engineering Physics, Tsinghua University; I setup a monitor system and analysed the collected metrics; I also contributed to the architecture design of the network.

Student Research Training on Overlay Network Spring 2019 - Spring 2020: Advised by Wenfei WU, IIIS, Tsinghua University

Teaching Assistant

Introduction to Computer Systems Spring 2022 and Spring 2023

Taught by Wei XU and Mingyu GAO, IIIS, Tsinghua University

Raspberry Pi/Course design: Students got hands on RPi for lab assignment and I was there to setup the system and fix any issue on network/hardware/configuration. Compared with simply giving away ssh access, distributing RPi has a large amount of dirty work but I thought students could get an experience of system administration from their early undergraduate life and that would be beneficial.
TA sessions: Instead of training students on tools, skills and knowledge like traditional TA session, I prefer to give talks on topics in correspondence with the formal courses, but deeper, to show them the methodology/philosophy of computer system design. That is what a system course should convey, like other Yao class theory courses do. In these talks, complicated details are not important (as in theory course, mathematical tools/proof details are not the core) but only with comprehensive presentation could the flow of ideas be shown. I gave them talks on "C array/pointer difference (cited from Expert C programming)", "Cache architecture and probing (cited from Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach", "User/kernel mode and operating system basics (RISC-V privileged ISA as example)", "Learn Git The Not So Super Hard Way (manually construct .git folder to deeply understand git commands instead of just memorizing)", "MMU, kernel, syscall and malloc (whole stack of memory management, from hardware to software)", "Embedded system USB driver and Linux FunctionFS as USB driver (demonstrating OS-device interaction)", "Quantum network protocol stack (a comparable example for classical network stack)". Interestingly, some students could understand what my talks want to convey and I was very inspired, despite the hardness of preparing these talks.

Writing and Communication Spring 2020 - Spring 2023: Plagiarism detection of essays, Tsinghua University

Honors and Awards

Outstanding Undergraduate 2022: IIIS, 15 in total

Comprehensive Outstanding Scholarship 2019 and 2020: Tsinghua University