Welcome to my home-page. This is the wonderful site of Justin. Did you know that the first computer to reach 1 billion floating-point operations a second (at the time in 1985 the fastest computer in the world, the Cray-2) was cooled with artificial human blood? It also contained a decorative fountain in the coolant circulation system. It’s true! Seymour Cray also liked to dig a tunnel in his backyard. And he received help on hard problems from elves (though he may have been joking, possibly).

I’m a 2nd-year PhD student at UT Austin studying hardware-aware LLM serving systems with my advisor Dr. Lizy John. I previously worked at xAI (software engineering specialist) and AMD (research associate in agentic systems and scale-in/scale-up systems). I’m also leading the architecture team at Longhorn Silicon. Send me an email at justingarrigus@utexas.edu.

News

Concluded my internship at AMD and returned full-time to UT Austin
Paper accepted at HPCA (link)!
Started working as a Research Associate Intern at AMD
Graduated from UNT with my Master’s degree
Successfully defended my Master’s thesis
First day of PhD at UT Austin
First day of Master’s at UNT

Introduction

Hello! My name is Justin. I’m a PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin currently studying computer architecture. My advisor is Dr. Lizy Kurian John, and my work is with the Laboratory of Computer Architecture. I’m currently interested in creating hardware-aware agentic AI systems.

Previously, my Master’s thesis is (1) an exploration of deep-learning compilers, (2) an L2-cache microarchitecture for reducing duplicated values in lowered im2col convolution, and (3) an analysis of distributed GPU systems evaluating LLM workloads, and was advised by Dr. Hui Zhao at the University of North Texas. My Bachelor’s thesis is a detailed investigation of programming languages, syntax vs. semantics, and the introduction of a custom programming language maximizing expressibility of any programming problem, advised by Dr. Barrett Bryant.

My full CV can be found here. You can contact me at justingarrigus@utexas.edu.

This page last updated September 27, 2026