About Me
I am a final year PhD student at the University of Chicago, advised by Professor Andrew A.Chien. I study the design of environmentally sustainable large-scale computing systems. My research explores how to perform carbon assessment of computing systems and validate the assessment model with limited data and least effort, as well as how to reduce the carbon footprint of computing systems.
I will be graduating in Spring 2027 and am looking for research focused positions in industry and postdoc opportunities. Please reach out if you find my research aligns with your work.
Research Areas:
Sustainable Computing, Cloud Computing, Distributed Storage Systems.Contact:
<first_name><last_name>(at)uchicago(dot)eduPublications
*indicates equal contribution.- Modeling the Carbon Footprint of HPC: The Top 500 and EasyC
Varsha Rao, Andrew A Chien.
Workshop on Sustainable Supercomputing at Supercomputing 2025 (SC 25). St Louis, Missouri, USA. November, 2025. - EasyC: Practical Carbon-Emissions Estimates for Research Computing Systems
Varsha Rao, Andrew A Chien.
Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing 2025: The Power of Collaboration (ACM PEARC). Columbus, Ohio, USA. July, 2025. - Understanding the Operational Carbon Footprint of Storage Reliability and Management
Varsha Rao, Andrew A Chien.
The 3rd Workshop on Sustainable Computer Systems (ACM HotCarbon). Santa Cruz, CA, USA. July, 2024. - Exploding AI Power Use: an Opportunity to Rethink Grid Planning and Management
Liuzixuan Lin, Rajini Wijayawardana, Varsha Rao, Hai Nguyen, Emmanuel Wedan GNIBGA, Andrew A Chien.
The 15th ACM International Conference on Future and Sustainable Energy Systems (e-Energy). Singapore. July, 2024. (Best Notes Paper Candidate) - Reducing the Carbon Impact of Generative AI Inference (today and in 2035)
Andrew A Chien*, Liuzixuan Lin*, Hai Nguyen*, Varsha Rao*, Tristan Sharma*, Rajini Wijayawardana*.
The 2nd Workshop on Sustainable Computer Systems (ACM HotCarbon). Boston, MA, USA. July, 2023. - Beyond PUE: Flexible Datacenters Empowering the Cloud to Decarbonize
Andrew A Chien, Chaojie Zhang, Liuzixuan Lin, Varsha Rao.
The 1st Workshop on Sustainable Computer Systems (HotCarbon). San Diego, CA, USA. July, 2022.