Hi, I’m Hoa Nguyen.

Email: hoanguyen@ucdavis.edu
GitHub: https://github.com/hnpl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hnpl
GoogleScholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=g6KC_pUAAAAJ

I’m a fifth-year PhD student at UC Davis, working with Professor Jason Lowe-Power on bringing flexibility to hardware, making the hardware adaptable to the ever-changing demands of modern software systems.

More specifically, we leverage reconfigurable technologies located near the last-level cache (LLC) to build accelerators. The reconfigurable technologies integrate hardware construction into the software development cycle, furthering the impact and practicality of hardware/software co-design. I strongly believe that, given the vast capacity of LLC in modern CPUs, using reconfigurable technologies near LLC is the most viable path toward maximizing the computational efficiency of modern systems.

I have an extensive background in hardware architectures and software development. I have contributed to the gem5 project, a widely-used hardware simulator, at UC Davis for 5 years, and I interned at Google and AMD during my PhD.

I hope my CV would ever land me an impactful research position. Let’s see!


Research

My research work involves using the right tools for modeling hardware and writing software for new hardware.


Teaching

I strongly believe that student engagement in classroom/research comes from understanding the nature of the problem, and from the fluency of using tools (e.g., using software, using learned facts, and using learned abstractions) for problem-solving. As an extensive user of coding agents (Copilot, Gemini, and Claude), I strongly believe that the understanding the problem and the fluency are even more important in the AI/LLM era as these factors help students formulate the right questions to the AI.


Internships


Previous Works

I worked at Professor Ian Davidson’s lab during my undergraduate study, during which I co-authored a SIGKDD paper.


Previous Projects

As a simulator developer, I did a lot of “zero-to-one” projects, i.e., implementing something that does not exist.


Open-source Contributions


Updated: Sept 23rd, 2025