Rachit Nigam

Hi! I’m Rachit Nigam Pronunciation: Ruh-CHITH NI-gum. First name rhymes with “crutch-it”. a visiting scholar at MIT working with Jonathan Ragan-Kelley and a PhD candidate at Cornell University working with Adrian Sampson. I am building new programming models for designing and using hardware accelerators (Filament, Calyx, Dahlia). My research is supported by the Jane Street Fellowship. I’ve previously been associated with the UW PLSE lab, Brown’s PLT group, Facebook Reality Labs, Google Web Infrastructure team, and the PLASMA research group.

PLTea  I started PLTea during PLDI ’20 in hopes of keeping social interactions alive during virtual conferences. PLTea now has over 400 members, meets monthly, has been organized several times with various PL conferences (PLDI ’22, ICFP ’21, SPLASH ’21, PLDI ’21) and has inspired spin-offs in other communities (ArchChat).

Personal  I am a classically trained Tabla player and have a continuing obsession with synthesizers and digital audio workstations. When the weather allows for it, I go on long bike rides, often in search of little oddities.

Apr ’23

Gave an invited talk on Dahlia at MIT’s PL Review.

Apr ’23

Gave a talk on Filament at LatchUp ’23.

Mar ’23

Our paper Stepwise Debugging for Hardware Accelerators won the distinguished artifact award at ASPLOS ’23.

Mar ’23

Awarded the Jane Street Fellowship.

Nov ’22

Invited talks at Williams College and Microsoft Research.

Publications

Conferences

Draft  ’24
Rachit Nigam, Ethan Gabizon, Edmund Lam, Adrian Sampson

Workshop & Short Papers

SNAPL  ’17

Posts

Sep ’23
GitHub-centric Research Management
PhD student is an issue triager
Sep ’23
Your Eternal Spark
I don't have words to put here
Aug ’23
Transpiler, a meaningless word
PhD Student fights the good fight
Jul ’23
The Stateless Manager
PhD student is not forgetful; just sage
Sep ’22
Why Study Programming Languages
PhD candidate proselytizes
Aug ’22
Lies Academics Believe
PhD candidate looks into a mirror
Jan ’22
Dear Sir, You Have Built a Compiler
Sweetly addressed to those who did not want to build a compiler