Hi! I am a hardware architecture modeling engineer on the Google Cloud TPU architecture team.

I got my PhD from Rice CS, where I had great fun working with Dr. Scott Rixner and Dr. Alan L. Cox, on computer architecture and systems. My thesis is on hardware acceleration and numerical analysis for computational statistics & bioinformatics. Keywords: performance optimizations, pipelining, floating-point arithmetic, FPGAs, high-level synthesis.

Prior to Rice, I spent two wonderful years at University of Rochester CS (M.S.). I had great fun working on hardware acceleration with Dr. Yuhao Zhu, and I was fortunate to be instructed by Dr. Sreepathi Pai.

I enjoy writing and reading, both technical and non-technical.

Industry Experience

  • Hardware architecture modeling engineer at Google (Sunnyvale CA, 2025 Jun - Current) Hardware architecture intern at Waymo (Mountain View CA, 2024 May - Aug)

Publications

  • Design and accuracy trade-offs in Computational Statistics Tiancheng Xu, Alan L. Cox, Scott Rixner IEEE IISWC 2025
  • An FPGA Accelerator for Genome Variant Calling* *: Fine-grained pipelining and Design Space Analysis extended from the FCCM version.
     PDF | ACM Link | Code | Teaser Slides (less overwhelming) Tiancheng Xu, Scott Rixner, Alan L. Cox ACM TRETS 2023
  • An FPGA Accelerator for Genome Variant Calling PDF | IEEE Link | Code | News Tiancheng Xu, Scott Rixner, Alan L. Cox FCCM 2022
  • Mesorasi: Enabling Efficient Point Cloud Analytics via Delayed-Aggregation PDF | IEEE Link | Code | Talk | Slides Yu Feng*, Boyuan Tian*, Tiancheng Xu*, Paul Whatmough, Yuhao Zhu (*: Co-primary authors) MICRO 2020
  • Tigris: Architecture and Algorithms for 3D Perception in Point Clouds PDF | ACM Link | Code Tiancheng Xu*, Boyuan Tian*, Yuhao Zhu (*: Co-primary authors) MICRO 2019
    Best Paper Nominee

Research Artifacts

Services & Awards

  • Artifact Evaluation: IISWC 2022, FCCM 2024.
  • Student Volunteer-ship: PLDI 2022/2021/2020, SPLASH 2020.
  • Ken Kennedy Institute Computational Science and Engineering Fellowship.
  • Former Steering Committee member, Computer Architecture Student Association (CASA).

Hobbies

  • Combat sport: karate (2004 - 2016)
  • Running (10k, half and full marathon)
  • Weightlifting: powerlifting, powerbuilding, strongman, CrossFit
  • Reading: biography, psychology, apologetics, technical, business, etc
  • Writing
  • ...

Email: txu {AT} rice [DOT] edu