Eliot Solomon

About

My name is Eliot, and I'm a PhD student in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, advised by Dimitrios Skarlatos and Todd C. Mowry. My research focuses on computer systems, particularly the intersection of operating systems and computer architecture. I'm a member of the CAOS group and the Parallel Data Lab.

I was born in San Francisco and grew up in Buffalo, New York. I lived in Houston for five years while earning my bachelor's and master's degrees in Computer Science at Rice University. My other interests include literature, history, economics, current events, and international relations. I also like to play basketball, watch the Buffalo Bills, and listen to music in my free time.

Research Experience

I pursued a fifth year master's degree through Rice CS's Graduate Research Fellowship program, where I worked as a research assistant under Dr. Alan L. Cox. We implemented transparent 64 KB superpage support on ARM systems into the FreeBSD kernel. Superpages improve the performance of a broad class of applications by reducing the frequency of costly TLB misses during memory accesses. Medium-sized superpages (such as 64 KB on ARM) are particularly beneficial to "everyday" workloads like compiling source code or performing server-side webpage rendering. Our work has been covered here in a FreeBSD Status Report. Along the way, we completed an empirical investigation of the PTE Coalescing feature of the Zen architecture developed by AMD and presented our results at MEMSYS 2023. All of this work formed the core of my master's thesis, titled "Effective Techniques for Managing Intermediate-Sized Superpages."

During the summer and fall of 2020, I was a member of Rice's CS Bioinformatics Group led by Dr. Luay Nakhleh. There, I investigated the performance of various methods of inferring phylogenetic networks (an extension of the concept of a gene tree which allows for events like hybridization) based on genetic data using a HPC cluster.

Publications

Eliot H. Solomon, Yufeng Zhou, and Alan L. Cox. 2023. An Empirical Evaluation of PTE Coalescing. In The International Symposium on Memory Systems (MEMSYS ’23), October 2–5, 2023, Alexandria, VA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 16 pages. [DOI] [preprint]

Teaching Experience

For the Fall 2023 semester, I was a teaching assistant for COMP 614, a programming and data science course for Master of Data Science students at Rice.

During the Spring 2023 semester (my second consecutive in the role), I was the head TA for COMP 321, Rice's introductory computer systems class.

In Fall 2021, I TAed for COMP 215, a course on introductory object-oriented programming, data structures, and program design principles.

I served as a TA for COMP 182, an introductory discrete math and algorithms course taken by all CS students at Rice in their first year, for the Spring 2021 and Spring 2022 semesters.

Over the summer of 2020, I helped instruct a group of incoming Master of Computer Science students during a weeklong discrete mathematics bootcamp that was designed for learners without a pre-existing background in computer science.

Extracurricular Experience

My senior year I was co-President of the Rice CS Club, and prior to that I served as Co-Internal Vice President as well as a member of the Club's I/O Committee, which works to further student-faculty interaction within the computer science department at Rice.

At McMurtry College, one of Rice's residential colleges, I've served in the past as a First-Year Representative, Treasurer, External Social committee co-head, and Seniors Committee member. As Externals co-head I planned Y2K, the first "public party" at Rice since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I was also a Head Academic Fellow at McMurtry, helping to administer the peer tutoring program of the Rice Office of Academic Advising.

Finally, I was the director of the Technology Sector of the Rice Undergraduate Investment Fund from Fall 2021 through Spring 2023.

Personal Projects

I designed and implemented MurtPass, a customized ticketing and access control system tailored to the needs of Y2K built using Java, jte, PostgreSQL, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. MurtPass included features like Google Sign-In, QR code scanning, an automated waitlist, and a Venmo payment tracking tool, and was covered in Rice's student newspaper, the Rice Thresher.

Resume/CV

My CV can be found here (last updated 1/2025).

I also have a profile on LinkedIn.

Contact

My email is ehsolomo [AT] cs.cmu.edu.