My name is Nick Lindsay and I am a Ph. D. candidate in Computer Science at Yale University, where I am advised by Professor Abhishek Bhattacharjee. My research focuses on microarchitecture, the hardware-software interface, and applications of statistical and formal methods for computing systems. On August 1st, 2026 I will be joining AMD Research and Advanced Development.
I have developed CounterPoint - a modeling framework that helps experts test, confirm, refute, and refine their assumptions about the microarchitectures they profile with hardware performance counters. CounterPoint applies techniques from high-dimensional convex geometry and statistics to provide a counter-example guided model refinement methodology, allowing experts to reconcile their mental model of the microarchitecture with the hardware. Using CounterPoint, I have found evidence for a number of understudied features in the memory management unit of Intel Haswell CPUs, including a TLB prefetcher, early paging-structure cache lookup, and mergeable page table walks.
Updates
- March 25, 2026. CounterPoint received the Best Paper Award at ASPLOS 2026!
- February 22, 2026. Delighted to accept a job offer at AMD Research and Advanced Development!
- January 6, 2026. The extended version of
CounterPoint is available on arXiv!
- November 25, 2025. CounterPoint accepted for publication at ASPLOS 2026!
- August 6, 2024. Understand Address Translation Behaviors using Hardware Performance Counters accepted for publication at IISWC 2024!