I lead the UT Systems and Storage Lab. I am also a part of the LASR research group. I am broadly interested in systems-ish stuff: operating systems and distributed systems. Most of the work I've done so far has been in file systems, distributed systems, and storage. Recent interests: key-value stores, non-volatile memory, and verification.

I am interested in recruiting new PhD students. I am not currently hiring Masters students. If you are interested in working with me, please check out my page for prospective students and send me an email (after reading this!). Make sure to apply to the PhD program by the deadline (December 15).

If you are a student considering grad school or applying for grad school, these links may be useful (advice on contacting profs, getting letters of recommendation, etc.)

I maintain the SOSP/OSDI Hall of Fame and the FAST Hall of Fame. These pages indicate who has published the most at these premier venues, and who has been publishing recently. These are good guides for grad students trying to decide which professor to work with!

My research is supported by NSF, VMware, Facebook, and Google. I am an Affiliated Researcher at VMware Research.

Students

• Jayashree Mohan (PhD)
  
• Soujanya Ponnapalli (PhD)
  
• Rohan Kadekodi (Masters)
  

Alumni

• Tianyu Cheng (Masters, Apple)
  
• Pandian Raju (Masters, Rubrik)
  
• Dhathri Purohith (Masters, Nutanix)
  

Teaching

Fall 2017: Virtualization: CS 378

Fall 2016: Graduate Operating Systems: CS 380L

Fall 2014: Back at Wisconsin: Introduction to Operating Systems (CS 537)

Service

2019: FAST
2018: FAST, SYSTOR, ATC, OSDI
2017: ACM SRC (with SOSP), SOCC, MASCOTS, MSST, HotStorage, NVMW, WWW
2016: HotStorage, NVMW

External Reviewer/Review Committee Member for ASPLOS 18, ASPLOS 17, Eurosys 17
Reviewer for TOCS, TACO, TDSC, TOS

NSF Panelist in 2018

News

Mar 2018: I was awarded a Google Faculty Research Award to work on write-optimized infrastructure!

Feb 2018: Our work on Protocol-Aware Recovery was featured in the Morning Paper!

Feb 2018: Our work on protocol-aware recovery was awarded one of the best Best Paper Awards at FAST 2018!

Jan 2018: Awarded the NSF CAREER Award for project on building IO-efficient infrastructure!

Dec 2017: Ashlie Martinez, the undergrad leading the CrashMonkey project, was selected as one of the three awardees of the CRA Best Undergraduate Award 2018! Congratulations Ashlie!

Dec 2017: Our paper on protocol-aware recovery in consensus-based distributed storage systems was accepted to FAST 2018!

Oct 2017: Invited to attend Facebook Systems and Networking Faculty Summit! Excited to tour the Fort Worth datacenter.

Sep 2017: Students Pandian Raju and Jayashree Mohan were awarded scholarships to attend SOSP 2017. Congratulations!

Sep 2017: Our poster on IO Amplification in Linux file systems was awarded Best Poster at ApSys 17! Congratulations Jayashree and Rohan!

Sep 2017: Jayashree presented our work on the complexities in benchmarking SQLite at ApSys 17.

Aug 2017: PebblesDB, our work on reducing IO amplification in key-value stores, was accepted to SOSP 2017!

Older News

Talks

Apr 2018. Presented PebblesDB at Microsoft Research, Redmond.

Nov 2017. Presented PebblesDB at the Austin Industry-Academia Partnership.

Nov 2017. Presented at Austin Liberal Arts and Science Academy (LASA) about the many facets of computer science.

Jul 2017. Presented at NetApp, VMware, Uber, Facebook, and Google about reducing write amplification in LSM-based key-value stores.

Jun 2017. Spoke to high school students as part of the First Bytes program!

Older Talks

Awards

• Best Paper Award at FAST 2018
  
• NSF CAREER Award 2018
  
• Best Poster Award at ApSys 2017
  
• Best Paper Award at FAST 2017
  
• ACM SIGOPS Dennis M. Ritchie Dissertation Award 2016
  
• Microsoft Research Graduate Fellowship 2014
  
• University of Wisconsin-Madison Alumni Scholarship 2009
  

Awards won by members of research group

• Ashlie Martinez: CRA Best Undergraduate Researcher 2018
  
• Ashlie Martinez: UT Austin Dean's Honored Graduate 2018
  
• Ashlie Martinez: UT Austin Aspire Research Excellence Award 2018
  

Work in Progress

Recent Publications (All)

mLSM: Making Authenticated Storage Faster in Ethereum
Pandian Raju, Soujanya Ponnapalli, Evan Kaminsky, Gilad Oved, Zachary Keener, Vijay Chidambaram, Ittai Abraham
HotStorage 18
PDF   Bibtex