Prashanth Thinakaran
About Prashanth Thinakaran
Prashanth Thinakaran is a Member of Technical Staff at Cerebras Systems, where he focuses on managing AI infrastructure and improving cluster health. He has extensive experience in high-performance computing and has held various roles at organizations such as KLA, Adobe, and Intel Corporation.
Current Role at Cerebras Systems
Prashanth Thinakaran serves as a Member of Technical Staff at Cerebras Systems, a position he has held since 2022. In this role, he focuses on building tools to manage internal AI infrastructure, enhancing site reliability, and monitoring the health of clusters. His work involves provisioning purpose-built AI appliances, particularly the Cerebras CS-2, which are utilized for training large AI models in various scientific applications.
Previous Experience in High Performance Computing
Prior to his current role, Thinakaran accumulated extensive experience in high performance computing. He worked at the High Performance Computing Lab at Penn State University as a Graduate Student Research Assistant from 2015 to 2020. He also held positions at KLA as an HPC Systems Engineer from 2020 to 2022, and at VMware as an HPC Performance Engineer in 2017. His work often involved performance management and resource optimization in production data centers.
Education and Academic Background
Thinakaran earned a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Computer Science and Engineering from Penn State University, completing his studies from 2013 to 2020. He also holds a Bachelor of Technology in Information Technology from Anna University, where he studied from 2009 to 2013. His foundational education includes a focus on Mathematics and Computer Science at DAV Matric Higher Secondary School and SBOA Matric Higher Secondary School.
Internship and Early Career Experience
During his early career, Thinakaran gained valuable experience through various internships. He worked as a Research Intern at Adobe in the Bigdata Experience Lab for three months in 2019. Additionally, he held a position as a Performance Engineer at Intel Corporation for three months in 2015. His early roles contributed to his expertise in performance engineering and high performance computing.
Research and Development Contributions
Throughout his career, Thinakaran has been involved in significant research and development projects. At KLA, he worked on modeling capacity, performance, and planning operations through Infrastructure-as-Code projects. His doctoral research focused on performance and resource management of heterogeneous compute elements in production data centers, highlighting his commitment to advancing the field of high performance computing.