Manish Munikar

Manish Munikar

PhD Candidate

👦 About

I’m a Computer Science PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Arlington (supervised by Dr. Jia Rao), specializing in the intersection of high-performance systems and ML, with multiple Amazon internships as well as multiple top-tier research publications. Currently, I’m exploring KV cache transfer optimizations for distributed LLM inference using cutting-edge NVIDIA SmartNICs and CXL technologies. I obtained my B.E. in Computer Engineering from Pulchowk Engineering Campus, Tribhuvan University, Nepal in 2017.

Interests: cloud/distributed systems, applied ML, LLM inference, network systems, KV cache, CXL

📢 I’m actively seeking full-time Research Scientist, Applied Scientist, ML Engineer, or Software Engineer roles.

📝 Publications

I have published 5 peer-reviewed research papers with a total of 300+ citations.

  • image J. Lei, M. Munikar, H. Lu and J. Rao, “Accelerating Packet Processing in Container Overlay Networks via Packet-level Parallelism,” In Proceedings of the 37th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Conference (IPDPS 2023).
    [Paper]

  • image M. Munikar, J. Lei, H. Lu and J. Rao, “PRISM: Streamlined Packet Processing for Containers with Flow Prioritization,” In Proceedings of the 42nd IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS 2022).
    [Paper] [Code]

  • image J. Lei, M. Munikar, K. Suo, H. Lu and J. Rao, “Parallelizing Packet Processing in Container Overlay Networks,” In Proceedings of the Sixteenth European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys 2021).
    [Paper] [Slides] [Code]

  • image M. Munikar, S. Shakya and A. Shrestha, “Fine-grained Sentiment Classification using BERT,” IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Transforming Business and Society (AITB 2019).
    [Paper] [Code]

  • image P. Dhakal, M. Munikar and B. Dahal, “One-Shot Template Matching for Automatic Document Data Capture,” IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Transforming Business and Society (AITB 2019).
    [Paper]

🧳 Experience

  • Applied Scientist Intern @ Amazon, Bellevue, WA (Summer 2024)
  • Applied Scientist Intern @ Amazon, Sunnyvale, CA (Summer 2022)
  • Applied Scientist Intern @ Amazon, (Remote) (Summer 2021)
  • Data Scientist @ Docsumo, Kathmandu, Nepal (Jul 2018—Dec 2019)
  • Software Developer @ LIS Nepal, Lalitpur, Nepal (Oct 2017—Jun 2019)

🎓 Education

  • PhD in Computer Science @ University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX (2020—present)
  • B.E. in Computer Engineering @ Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu, Nepal (2013—2017)

💬 Teaching

  • Worked as a Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) for the following courses:
    • CSE 3318: Data Structure & Algorithms (Spring 2026)
    • CSE 5306: Distributed Systems (Spring 2025, Fall 2025)
    • CSE 6363: Machine Learning (Fall 2024)
    • CSE 6331: Advanced Topics in Database Systems (Spring 2024)
    • CSE 2312: Computer Architecture (Fall 2023)