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Software & Hardware Systems

Our researchers are driving innovation across the entire hardware, software and network stack to make computer systems more reliable, efficient and secure. 

From internet-scale networks, to next-generation chip designs, to deep learning frameworks and more, we build and refine the devices and applications that individuals, industries and, indeed, entire economies depend upon every day.


Research Groups & Labs

Gloved hands piping liquid into a smalll rectangular nanopore device connected to a laptop

Molecular Information Systems Lab (MISL)

MISL explores the intersection of information technology and molecular biology using in-silico and wet lab experiments, drawing upon expertise from computer architecture, programming languages, synthetic biology and biochemistry.

Purple-tinted English QWERTY keyboard

Programming Languages & Software Engineering Group (PLSE)

The Programming Languages and Software Engineering Group advances fundamental research and practical applications in programming environments, program analysis, language design, synthesis, compilers, testing, verification and security.


Faculty Members

Faculty

Faculty


Centers & Initiatives

The NSF AI Institute for Agent-based Cyber Threat Intelligence and Operation (ACTION) seeks to change the way mission-critical systems are protected against sophisticated, ever-changing security threats. In cooperation with (and learning from) security operations experts, intelligent agents will use complex knowledge representation, logic reasoning, and learning to identify flaws, detect attacks, perform attribution, and respond to breaches in a timely and scalable fashion.

MEM-C is a NSF Materials Research Science and Engineering Center that integrates materials innovations with theory and computation to advance spin-photonic nanostructures and elastic layered quantum materials, aided by an “AI Core” that integrates artificial intelligence-driven materials discovery.

Highlights


Allen School News

A team of University of Washington and NVIDIA researchers developed FlashInfer, a versatile inference kernel library that can help make large language models faster and more adaptable, and received a Best Paper Award at MLSys 2025 for their work.

Allen School News

Armon Dadgar (B.S., ‘11) co-founded the high-flying cloud company HashiCorp inspired by an undergraduate research project. Now he and partner Joshua Kalla hope to sow the seeds of the next HashiCorp with a new professorship and support for a new generation of innovators and entrepreneurs.

Allen School News

Deeds introduced partition constraints, a new approach for making conjunctive query executions more efficient. He presented the research at the 28th International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT), earning both the Best Student Paper and Best Paper Awards.