The SAFARI Research Group is led by Professor Onur Mutlu. We are part of the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (D-ITET) at ETH Zurich.
Our group conducts cutting-edge research and education in computer architecture, computing systems, hardware security, bioinformatics, and software/hardware co-design. The major goal is to design fundamentally better computing architectures. Our work spans the boundaries between applications, systems, languages, system software, compilers, and hardware, with architecture at the core. We tackle many fundamental issues in high performance, energy efficiency, hardware security, fault tolerance, predictable systems, dependable systems, hardware/software cooperation, and genome analysis. We are especially excited about novel, fundamentally-secure and fundamentally-efficient computation, communication and memory/storage paradigms. Recent impactful examples of the group’s work include leading research into memory/storage systems and new computing paradigms, e.g., the discovery of the DRAM RowHammer vulnerability and the development of a comprehensive Processing-in-Memory paradigm.
Read our group's contribution to the 2021 D-ITET evaluation report, highlighting our research impact, teaching and key group contributions: SAFARI 2021 D-ITET Evaluation
Bachelor and Master's Theses and Semester Projects
We are always looking for highly qualified and motivated students and researchers. If you are an ETH student and are interested in doing a bachelor or master's thesis with us, or a semester project, please see our Theses and Projects page for potential topics.
If you are about to finish your bachelor or master’s degree or are already doing research and are interested in working with us at any level (internship, PhD, postdoc, visiting scholar), please visit our Work with us page.
SAFARI News

TRRespass wins the Pwnie Award for Most Innovative Research
TRRespass won the Pwnie Award for “Most Innovative Research” at the annual BlackHat Europe conference this week. Pwnies are the most prestigious industrial awards in the security community. Congratulations to the authors: Pietro […]

Paper: SneakySnake🐍: A Fast and Accurate Universal Genome Pre-Alignment Filter for CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs
Our recent paper is accepted in Bioinformatics! Mohammed Alser, Taha Shahroodi, Juan-Gomez Luna, Can Alkan, and Onur Mutlu, “SneakySnake: A Fast and Accurate Universal Genome Pre-Alignment Filter for CPUs, GPUs, […]

Radio Interview: Onur Mutlu discusses the review process
Listen to Onur Mutlu’s interview as he discusses the review process in the “ORF Dimensionen” broadcast on “Peer Review and Open Science” How well does peer review work? Interviewer: Mariann […]

IEEE Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award 2020 video
Onur received the IEEE Computer Society prestigious 2020 Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award for “innovative and impactful contributions to computer memory systems.” In honour of this achievement, the IEEE […]

We are at MICRO 2020 this week! Join Lois Orosa for his talk on FIGARO, Monday, October 19 6:30PM CEST
Our new paper: FIGARO: Improving System Performance via Fine-Grained In-DRAM Data Relocation and Caching will be presented by Lois Orosa at MICRO 2020 on Monday, October 19 at 6:30 PM CEST. […]

Best Paper Award MICRO 2020: Congratulations Minesh Patel and co-authors!
Our new paper: Bit-Exact ECC Recovery (BEER): Determining DRAM On-Die ECC Functions by Exploiting DRAM Data Retention Characteristics will be presented by Minesh Patel at MICRO 2020 on Monday, October […]

Paper MICRO 2020: Join Damla Senol Cali for her talk on Wednesday, October 21, 7PM CEST
Damla Senol Cali will present: GenASM: A High-Performance, Low-Power Approximate String Matching Acceleration Framework for Genome Sequence Analysis, Wednesday, October 21 at 7:00 PM CEST. Authors: Damla Senol Cali, Gurpreet […]
Paper MICRO 2020: Join Jawad Haj-Yahya for his talk Wednesday, October 21, 7:30PM CEST
Join Jawad Haj-Yahya for his MICRO 2020 talk where he will present our paper: FlexWatts: A Power- and Workload-Aware Hybrid Power Delivery Network for Energy-Efficient Microprocessors, Wednesday October 21 at […]
Talk: Intelligent Architectures for Intelligent Machines Oct 7
Join Onur for his online talk in the HKUST Engineering x HKSTP Distinguished Speaker Series on Oct 7 at 11:00 CEST (Zurich time). You can register here: https://calendar.ust.hk/events/hkust-engineering-x-hkstp-distinguished-speaker-series-webinar-intelligent-architectures Computing is […]
Award: Jisung Park was awarded a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship
Jisung Park was awarded a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the National Research Foundation of Korea for his project on “Storage System Design for Machine Learning Applications”. Congratulations Jisung — We […]
Paper: Accelerating Genome Analysis: A Primer on an Ongoing Journey
In our new paper, we describe the ongoing journey in significantly improving the performance of read mapping: Accelerating Genome Analysis: A Primer on an Ongoing Journey Mohammed Alser, Zülal Bingöl, Damla Senol […]

Paper: NERO: A Near High-Bandwidth Memory Stencil Accelerator for Weather Prediction Modeling
Gagandeep Singh presented his work on “NERO: A Near High-Bandwidth Memory Stencil Accelerator for Weather Prediction Modeling” yesterday at the International Conference on Field-Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL) 2020. Co-authors: Dionysios […]