About
 |
Huaicheng Li Assistant Professor, Virginia Tech CS Office: 4109 Gilbert Place Email: huaicheng@cs.vt.edu Code: Personal, Group Google Scholar | DBLP Curriculum Vitae: [pdf] |
> [12/24] I will be teaching Advanced Linux Kernel Programming in Spring 2025. Have fun hacking.
> [09/24] Read our latest CXL research:
here. Or listen to it here, for fun :). Feel free to reach out with comments/feedback.
I am an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department at Virginia Tech (since Fall 2022). I earned my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Chicago in 2020 and completed a 2-year postdoctoral position at CMU Parallel Data Lab (PDL).
My group works on Computer Systems, with a focus on Operating Systems, Storage Systems, Memory Systems, and Systems Architecture. We engage in comprehensive analysis, benchmarking, hacking, design, and implementation of systems to investigate enhanced systems support for modern and emerging hardware, interfaces, and applications. Our primary goals include improving performance, resource efficiency, and programmability. The key research themes we focus on are as follows:
- Performance: We co-design software/hardware stack for low and predictable end-to-end latencies and high throughput
- Efficiency: We design and build offloaded/disaggregated systems for improved resource and cost efficiency at scale
- Programmability: We develop systems/platform support tailored for emerging hardware (e.g., CXL) to foster adoption
For the most up-to-date information, please refer to Huaicheng's CV.
Students
I have the honor to work with the following amazing students:
PhD students
- Hansen Idden (08/24-)
- Sijia Li (08/24-)
- Hanchen Xu (08/24-)
- Shoaib Qazi (08/23-)
- Jinshu Liu (08/22-)
- Hamid Hadian (08/22-)
- Sumit Monga (08/19-)
- Inho Song* (w/ Sam Noh, 08/23-)
- Yuyue Wang* (visiting VT)
- Yuze Li* (primary advisor: Ali Butt, 08/21-)
Publications
| =========== |
Conference papers |
| ASPLOS'23 Distinguished Paper Award |
Pond: CXL-Based Memory Pooling Systems for Cloud Platforms Huaicheng Li, Daniel S. Berger, Lisa Hsu, Daniel Ernst, Pantea Zardoshti, Stanko Novakovic, Monish Shah, Samir Rajadnya, Scott Lee, Ishwar Agarwal, Mark D. Hill, Marcus Fontoura, Ricardo Bianchini [pdf] [slides] [poster] [talk] [code] IEEE Micro Top Picks 2024 Honorable Mention [Huge shout-out to my student, Jinshu Liu for his significant contributions to the IEEE Micro Top Picks submission!] |
| ASPLOS'23 |
RAIZN: Redundant Array of Independent Zoned Namespaces. Thomas Kim, Jekyeom Jeon, Nikhil Arora, Huaicheng Li, Michael Kaminsky, David Andersen, Gregory R. Ganger, George Amvrosiadis, Matias Bjørling 
 [pdf] [code] |
| SYSTOR'22 Best Paper Award |
Fantastic SSD Internals and How to Learn and Use Them In Proceedings of the 15th ACM International Systems and Storage Conference (SYSTOR), 2022. Nanqinqin Li, Mingzhe Hao, Huaicheng Li, Xing Lin, Tim Emami, and Haryadi S. Gunawi. [paper] [slides] [talk] [code] |
| SOSP'21 |
IODA: A Host/Device Co-Design for Strong Predictability Contract on Modern Flash Storage In Proceedings of the 28th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), 2021. [Acceptance Rate: 15.5%, 54 out of 348] Huaicheng Li, Martin L. Putra, Ronald Shi, Xing Lin, Gregory R. Ganger, Haryadi S. Gunawi.
 [paper] [slides] [animation] [short talk] [long talk] [poster] [code] |
| ASPLOS'20 |
LeapIO: Efficient and Portable Virtual NVMe Storage on ARM SoCs In Proceedings of the 25th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), 2020. [Acceptance Rate: 18.1%, 86 out of 476] Huaicheng Li, Mingzhe Hao, Stanko Novakovic, Vaibhav Gogte, Sriram Govindan, Dan R. K. Ports, Irene Zhang, Ricardo Bianchini, Haryadi S. Gunawi, Anirudh Badam. [paper] [slides] [animation] [talk] [code] |
| FAST'18 |
The CASE of FEMU: Cheap, Accurate, Scalable and Extensible Flash Emulator
In Proceedings of the 16th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST), 2018. [Acceptance Rate: 16.5%, 23 out of 139] Huaicheng Li, Mingzhe Hao, Michael Hao Tong, Swaminathan Sundararaman, Matias Bjørling, Haryadi S. Gunawi. [paper] [slides] [animation] [poster] [talk] [code] |
| FAST'18 Best Paper Nominee |
Fail-Slow at Scale: Evidence of Hardware Performance Faults in Large Production Systems
In Proceedings of the 16th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST), 2018. [Acceptance Rate: 16.5%, 23 out of 139] Haryadi S. Gunawi, Riza O. Suminto, Russell Sears, Casey Golliher, Swaminathan Sundararaman, Xing Lin, Tim Emami, Weiguang Sheng, Nematollah Bidokhti, Caitie McCaffrey, Gary Grider, Parks M. Fields, Kevin Harms, Robert B. Ross, Andree Jacobson, Robert Ricci, Kirk Webb, Peter Alvaro, H. Birali Runesha, Mingzhe Hao, Huaicheng Li. [paper] [slides] [animation] [poster] [dataset] Coverage: the Morning Paper, ZDNet, HackerNews |
| SOSP'17 |
MittOS: Supporting Millisecond Tail Tolerance with Fast Rejecting SLO-Aware OS Interface
In Proceedings of the 26th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), 2017. [Acceptance Rate: 16.8%, 39 out of 232] Mingzhe Hao, Huaicheng Li, Michael Hao Tong, Chrisma Pakha, Riza Suminto, Cesar Stuardo, Andrew A. Chien, Haryadi S. Gunawi. [paper] [slides] [animation] [poster] [talk] [code] |
| FAST'17 Best Paper Nominee |
Tiny-Tail Flash: Near-Perfect Elimination of Garbage Collection Tail Latencies in NAND SSDs
In Proceedings of the 15th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST), 2017. [Acceptance Rate: 24.1%, 28 out of 116] Shiqin Yan, Huaicheng Li, Mingzhe Hao, Michael Hao Tong, Swaminathan Sundararaman, Andrew A. Chien, Haryadi S. Gunawi. [paper] [slides] [animation] [poster] [talk] [code] |
| =========== |
Journal papers |
| TODAES'24 |
ZoneTrace: A Zone Monitoring Tool for F2FS on ZNS SSDs ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES), 2024. Ping-Xiang Chen, Dongjoo Seo, Changhoon Sung, Jongheum Park, Minchul Lee, Huaicheng Li, Matias Bjørling, Nikil Dutt. |
| IEEE Micro'23 |
Design Tradeoffs in CXL-Based Memory Pools for Cloud Platforms IEEE Micro Special Issue on Emerging System Interconnects, 2023. Daniel S. Berger, Dan Ernst, Huaicheng Li, Pantea Zardoshti, Monish Shah, Samir Rajadnya, Scott Lee, Lisa Hsu, Ishwar Agarwal, Mark D. Hill, Ricardo Bianchini. |
| ACM TOS'23 |
Extending and Programming the NVMe I/O Determinism Interface for Flash Arrays ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS), Volume 19, Issue 1, February 2023. [Extended version of the IODA paper at SOSP'21] Huaicheng Li, Martin L. Putra, Ronald Shi, Fadhil I. Kurnia, Xing Lin, Jaeyoung Do, Achmad Imam Kistijantoro, Gregory R. Ganger, Haryadi S. Gunawi. |
| ACM TOS'18 Fast-Tracked |
Fail-Slow at Scale: Evidence of Hardware Performance Faults in Large Production Systems ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS), Volume 14, Issue 3, November 2018. [Extended version of the FailSlow paper at FAST'18] Haryadi S. Gunawi, Riza O. Suminto, Russell Sears, Casey Golliher, Swaminathan Sundararaman, Xing Lin, Tim Emami, Weiguang Sheng, Nematollah Bidokhti, Caitie McCaffrey, Gary Grider, Parks M. Fields, Kevin Harms, Robert B. Ross, Andree Jacobson, Robert Ricci, Kirk Webb, Peter Alvaro, H. Birali Runesha, Mingzhe Hao, Huaicheng Li. |
| ACM TOS'17 Fast-Tracked |
Tiny-Tail Flash: Near-Perfect Elimination of Garbage Collection Tail Latencies in NAND SSDs ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS), Volume 13, Issue 3, October 2017. [Extended version of the TinyTail-Flash paper at FAST'17] Shiqin Yan, Huaicheng Li, Mingzhe Hao, Michael Hao Tong, Swaminathan Sundararaman, Andrew A. Chien, Haryadi S. Gunawi. |
| =========== |
Workshop papers |
| HotStorage'23 |
Is Garbage Collection Overhead Gone? Case study of F2FS on ZNS SSDs In 15th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems (HotStorage). Dongjoo Seo, Ping-Xiang Chen, Huaicheng Li, Matias Bjørling, Nikil Dutt. |
| NVMW'23 |
Pond: The Case of CXL Memory Pooling for Cloud Datacenters In the 14th Annual Non-Volatile Memories Workshop (NVMW). Huaicheng Li, Daniel S. Berger, Lisa Hsu, Daniel Ernst, Pantea Zardoshti, Stanko Novakovic, Monish Shah, Samir Rajadnya, Scott Lee, Ishwar Agarwal, Mark D. Hill, Marcus Fontoura, Ricardo Bianchini. |
Dissertation
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Evolving Storage Stack for Predictability and Efficiency
Huaicheng Li, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Chicago. |
Teaching
- CS5264/CS4114: (Advanced) Linux Kernel Programming (Spring 2025), Virginia Tech (cross-listed: ECE5414/ECE4414)
- CS3214: Computer Systems (Fall 2024), Virginia Tech
- CS5204: Operating Systems (Fall 2023), Virginia Tech
- CS6214: Advanced Topics in Operating Systems (Spring 2023), Virginia Tech
- CS3214: Computer Systems (Fall 2022), Virginia Tech
Selected Honors & Awards
- Rising Star Faculty Award, VT CS, 2024
- NSF CAREER Award, 2024
- IEEE Micro Top Picks 2024 Honorable Mention ("Pond: CXL-Based Memory Pooling Systems"), 2024
- ASPLOS'23 Distinguished Paper Award ("Pond: CXL-Based Memory Pooling Systems"), 2023
- SYSTOR'22 Best Paper Award ("Fantastic SSD Internals"), 2022
- Distinguished Reviewer Award, SYSTOR'21, 2021
- FAST'18 Best Paper Nominee ("Fail-Slow At Scale"), 2018
- FAST'17 Best Paper Nominee ("Tiny-Tail Flash"), 2017
Service
Program Committee (PC)
- FAST'25, ASPLOS'25, NSDI'25
- NSDI'24, ASPLOS'24, CCGRID'24
- ASPLOS'23 (Fall cycle), SYSTOR'23, NVMW'23, SysDW'23
- APSys'21, SYSTOR'21
External Review Committee (ERC)
- ISCA'24
- ASPLOS'23 (Spring and Summer cycles)
Journal Reviewing
- TOS, TOCS, TPDS, TC, JPDS, CACM, IEEE Micro, etc.
Open-source Software
Please refer to our GitHub repository (here) for a comprehensive collection of open-source projects developed by my research group. Below are a few examples: