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

Keynote talk: How can we make computing architectures intelligent? VLSI-TSA/VLSI-DAT 2020
Onur Mutlu gave a keynote talk and paper on “Intelligent Architectures for Intelligent Machines” at VLSI-TSA and VLSI-DAT 2020: Onur Mutlu, “Intelligent Architectures for Intelligent Machines” Plenary Keynote Talk at […]

Paper: The Non-IID Data Quagmire of Decentralized Machine Learning
Read our recent paper on “The Non-IID Data Quagmire of Decentralized Machine Learning” Kevin Hsieh, Amar Phanishayee, Onur Mutlu, and Phillip B. Gibbons In: Proceedings of the 37th International Conference […]

Keynote talk: Designing more principled system architectures: DAC2020
How can we design more principled system architectures to solve the data handling problem? Onur Mutlu talked this week during the Design Automation Conference Tutorial on “Toward New Era of […]

Talk: How to Build an Impactful Research Group: DAC Early Career Workshop
Do you want to learn “How to Build an Impactful Research Group”? Onur Mutlu joined Tulika Mitra, Jürgen Teich, and Helen Li for the panel discussion at the Design Automation […]

Lectures: Review the Digital Design & Computer Architecture lectures this summer
Review the Digital Design & Computer Architecture online lectures before the final exam! Course website: https://safari.ethz.ch/digitaltechnik/spring2020/

Papers: We are at ISCA 2020 this week (virtually)!
We are attending ISCA 2020 this week, 29 May – 3 June, online: https://iscaconf.org/isca2020/. Congratulations to Nastaran Hajinazar on winning the photo contest! We are excited to be presenting several […]

Award: TRRespass wins the Best Paper Award at IEEE S&P!
Our recent paper “TRRespass: Exploiting the Many Sides of Target Row Refresh”, in collaboration with the Systems and Network Security Group at VU Amsterdam has been awarded the Best Paper Award at […]

SAFARI Newsletter: April 2020
In the first edition of our SAFARI newsletter, we would like to share some of our group highlights from the past 15 months with you to reflect on our accomplishments […]

Award: Onur receives the IEEE Computer Society Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award
Onur Mutlu is this year’s recipient of the IEEE Computer Society prestigious 2020 Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award “for innovative and impactful contributions to computer memory systems.”Congratulations Onur!Read more:IEEE […]

Lectures: Computer Architecture course and lecture videos now online
The full set of Onur Mutlu‘s 2019 graduate-level computer architecture course lectures at ETH Zurich is online, along with all lecture videos, slides, and course materials: Course website Youtube playlist

Mohammed’s talk “A Roadmap for Fast and Efficient Genome Analysis” is online
Mohammed Alser was in Japan in December and gave a series of talks. His talk video on “A Roadmap for Fast and Efficient Genome Analysis” at the University of Tokyo Shirokanedai Campus, 20 […]

Maurice Wilkes Award interview on YouTube
Onur’s Maurice Wilkes Award interview at ISCA’19 with Xuehai Qian and his students Youwei and Qinyi is now on YouTube! YouTube interview link: https://youtu.be/8ffSEKZhmvo Article ETH D-INFK Communications: ACM SIGARCH Maurice […]