Nolan Cutler

Undergraduate Researcher @ Oregon State University • HiPCastor Group

Hello, I am a fourth-year undergraduate computer science student in Oregon State University’s Honors College (OSU). Since January 2025, I have been employed as a computer systems researcher with Professor Renato Figueiredo and am an incoming FALL intern at PNNL. Previously, I worked as a farmhand.

My research has been primarily in serverless computing, enabling scientists to compose complex, scientific workflows without the need for computing expertise. Recently, this has led me to research in agentic-AI for science.

I deeply enjoy working on interdisciplinary projects in problem-spaces that have a tangible impact on sustainability and technological democratization. I have been fortunate to have been involved in a number of such collaborations, including wildlife conservation efforts with the University of Osaka and Aomori University in Japan; ecological forecasting with Virginia Tech; smart farming with the agriculture department at OSU; and wildlife monitoring and education accessibility in Western Kenya through an ASU program.

Research

EphFlow: Cross-Platform FaaS Workflows with Serverless Ephemeral VM Orchestration

2026

Ashish Tulso Ramrakhiani, Nolan Cutler, Cayelan C. Carey, Austin D. Delany, Izzy Lerman, R. Quinn Thomas, Owen Wickman, Renato J. Figueiredo

IEEE eScience 2026 (accepted, to appear)

A Low-Power IoT Architecture for Environmental Monitoring in Resource-Constrained Areas

2026

Wassapon Watanakeesuntorn, Susumu Date, Nolan Cutler, Renato Figueiredo, Akito Okuyama, Shinji Shimojo

CENTRA 9

GIE: Projects in Human-Centered Design, EPICS in Kenya

May 2026

Global Intensive Experience, Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering

Selected to participate in ASU’s Global Intensive Experience in Western Kenya, contributing to an offline digital library with 300+ educational resources for rural schools and orphanages, and conservation technology development for wildlife monitoring with Maasai Mara communities.

EPICS Library Elephant Conservation

Projects

FaaSr (Serverless Computing Middleware)

FaaSr enables scientists to compose complex, multi-step workflows in serverless environments without computing infrastructure expertise. It simplifies the deployment and orchestration of functions across diverse platforms.

I refactored the runtime of the middleware from R to Python, and designed an RPC mechanism to the backend's user function handling that allowed for language extensibility (we currently support Python, R, and Julia). My architectural changes increased the flexibility of the system, supporting a co-authored paper accepted at IEEE eScience 2026, as well as an abstract at CENTRA 9.

This work is supported by the National Science Foundation under awards OAC-2450241 and OAC-2311124.

Backend Docker

Castor32 (RISC-V Single-Cycle Processor)

A 32-bit RISC-V single-cycle processor implemented in Verilog that was adopted into the Fall 2025 ECE572 (Computer Architecture) curriculum at Oregon State University.