I am a Ph.D. candidate at the Computer Systems Laboratory, Cornell University, supervised by Prof. Zhiru Zhang. My research focuses on building compilers, programming systems, and accelerators for large-scale machine learning workloads. In particular, I attempt to bridge the productivity and performance gap between emerging machine learning/scientific applications and heterogeneous accelerators (GPU/FPGA/NPU).

I was a recipient of the 2024 ML and Systems Rising Stars.

News

  • [4/7/25] [Talk] I will give a talk on Allo at the Jane Street Xcelerate Colloquium (JSXC) on May 16 in New York City.
  • [3/6/25] [Internship] I will join Google as a student researcher working on LLM for compilers in Sunnyvale, CA during this summer. See you in California!
  • [2/28/25] [Award] Our AREIS paper has been nominated as one of the Best Paper Candidates at FPGA’25. Congrats to the team!
  • [2/25/25] [Talk] Our presentation proposal on Allo has been accepted for the 2nd FPGA Developers’ Forum (FDF) at CERN.
  • [2/24/25] [Award] Niansong and I have been selected as Finalists for the 2025 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship!
  • [2/17/25] [Service] Served as a reviewer of NeurIPS’25.
  • [1/26/25] [Talk] Niansong and I will give a talk on Allo at Mengjia’s Lab @ MIT. Thanks for the invitation!
  • [1/7/25] [Talk] I will give a guest lecture on Allo in ECE 8893 – Parallel Programming for FPGAs at Georgia Tech. Many thanks to Callie for the kind invitation!
  • [12/31/24] [Talk] Our presentation proposal on Allo has been accepted to C4ML’25@CGO. Let’s meet in Las Vegas!
  • [12/24/24] [Tutorial] Our tutorial proposal on Allo has been accepted to FPGA’25. We warmly invite you to join us in Monterey in late February to discuss and collaborate!
  • [12/12/24] [Service] Served as a reviewer of ICML’25.

Education

Cornell University, US
Ph.D. in Computer Science
 Aug. 2021 - Present
Thesis: Composable Programming Models for Accelerated Computing
Committee: Zhiru Zhang, Adrian Sampson, Mohamed Abdelfattah
Accumulated GPA: 4.0/4.0
Cornell University, US
M.S. in Computer Science
 Aug. 2021 - Dec. 2024
Sun Yat-sen University, China
B.E. in Computer Science		 Aug. 2017 - Jun. 2021
Overall GPA: 3.95/4.00 (Major GPA: 3.99/4.00)
Ranking: 1/188

Work Experience

Google DeepMind , Sunnyvale, CA, US
Student Researcher, Compiler Team
Mentors: Mircea Trofin and Amir Yazdanbakhsh		 May 2025 - Aug. 2025
NVIDIA , Redmond, WA, US
Machine Learning Compiler Research Intern, Deep Learning Compiler Technology Team
Mentors: Bin Fan and Vinod Grover		 May 2024 - Nov. 2024
Amazon Web Services (AWS) , Santa Clara, CA, US
Applied Scientist Intern, Deep Engine-Science Team
Mentors: Cody Hao Yu, Shuai Zheng, and Yida Wang		 Aug. 2022 - Apr. 2023
ByteDance AI Lab , Beijing, China
Research Intern, MLSys Team, Applied Machine Learning (AML)
Mentors: Jun He and Yibo Zhu		 Aug. 2020 - May 2021

Publications

ARIES: An Agile MLIR-Based Compilation Flow for Reconfigurable Devices with AI Engines
Jinming Zhuang*, Shaojie Xiang*, Hongzheng Chen, Niansong Zhang, Zhuoping Yang, Tony Mao, Zhiru Zhang, Peipei Zhou
FPGA, 2025 (Best Paper Nominee)

Allo: A Programming Model for Composable Accelerator Design
Hongzheng Chen*, Niansong Zhang*, Shaojie Xiang, Zhichen Zeng, Mengjia Dai, Zhiru Zhang
PLDI, 2024 | Blog (Zhihu)

Understanding the Potential of FPGA-Based Spatial Acceleration for Large Language Model Inference
Hongzheng Chen, Jiahao Zhang, Yixiao Du, Shaojie Xiang, Zichao Yue, Niansong Zhang, Yaohui Cai, Zhiru Zhang
ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems (TRETS), 2024 (FCCM’24 Journal Track) | Blog (Zhihu)

Slapo: A Schedule Language for Progressive Optimization of Large Deep Learning Model Training
Hongzheng Chen, Cody Hao Yu, Shuai Zheng, Zhen Zhang, Zhiru Zhang, Yida Wang
ASPLOS, 2024 | Amazon Science

Formal Verification of Source-to-Source Transformations for HLS
Louis-Noël Pouchet, Emily Tucker, Niansong Zhang, Hongzheng Chen, Debjit Pal, Gabriel Rodríguez, Zhiru Zhang
FPGA, 2024 (Best Paper Award) | Cornell ECE News

BGL: GPU-Efficient GNN Training by Optimizing Graph Data I/O and Preprocessing
Tianfeng Liu*, Yangrui Chen*, Dan Li, Chuan Wu, Yibo Zhu, Jun He, Yanghua Peng, Hongzheng Chen, Hongzhi Chen, Chuanxiong Guo
NSDI, 2023

Accelerator Design with Decoupled Hardware Customizations: Benefits and Challenges
Debjit Pal, Yi-Hsiang Lai, Shaojie Xiang, Niansong Zhang, Hongzheng Chen, Jeremy Casas, Pasquale Cocchini, Zhenkun Yang, Jin Yang, Louis-Noël Pouchet, Zhiru Zhang
DAC, 2022 (Invited Paper)

HeteroFlow: An Accelerator Programming Model with Decoupled Data Placement for Software-Defined FPGAs
Shaojie Xiang, Yi-Hsiang Lai, Yuan Zhou, Hongzheng Chen, Niansong Zhang, Debjit Pal, Zhiru Zhang
FPGA, 2022

Krill: A Compiler and Runtime System for Concurrent Graph Processing
Hongzheng Chen, Minghua Shen, Nong Xiao, Yutong Lu
SC, 2021

FracBNN: Accurate and FPGA-Efficient Binary Neural Networks with Fractional Activations
Yichi Zhang, Junhao Pan, Xinheng Liu, Hongzheng Chen, Deming Chen, Zhiru Zhang
FPGA, 2021 (Best Paper Nominee)

Entropy-Directed Scheduling for FPGA High-Level Synthesis
Minghua Shen, Hongzheng Chen (Corresponding author), Nong Xiao
IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD), 2020

A Deep-Reinforcement-Learning-Based Scheduler for FPGA HLS
Hongzheng Chen, Minghua Shen
ICCAD, 2019

Workshops / Preprints

Allo: Catalyzing Accelerator Design and Programming for Machine Learning
Hongzheng Chen, Niansong Zhang, Shaojie Xiang, Zhiru Zhang
C4ML@CGO, 2025

Uncovering Magic with Magic: Schedule Reconstruction from High-Performance Kernel Libraries
Hongzheng Chen
PLDI Student Research Competition (SRC), 2024 (Bronze)

Structured Pruning is All You Need for Pruning CNNs at Initialization
Yaohui Cai, Weizhe Hua, Hongzheng Chen, G. Edward Suh, Christopher De Sa, Zhiru Zhang
arXiv:2203.02549, 2022

Teaching

Professional Service

Awards & Honors

Scholarship

  • Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship Finalist, Qualcomm, 2025
  • SenseTime Scholarship (21 undergrads in China), SenseTime, 2020
  • Chinese National Scholarship $\times$ 2 (Top 1%), Ministry of Education of PRC, 2018-2020
  • First-Prize Scholarship $\times$ 3 (Top 5%), Sun Yat-sen University, 2017-2020
  • Samsung Scholarship (Top 1%), Samsung Electronics, 2017-2018

Talks