Huaicheng LI


Assistant Professor, Virginia Tech CS

Office: 1149 Knowledge Works II

Email: huaicheng@cs.vt.edu

Code: Personal, Group

Google Scholar | DBLP

Curriculum Vitae: [pdf]

About

I am an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department at Virginia Tech (since Fall 2022). I got my CS Ph.D. degree in 2020 from University of Chicago, followed by a 2-year postdoc position at CMU Parallel Data Lab (PDL). I also did a few internships with Microsoft Research (3x) and NetApp.

My group focuses on fundamental Computer Systems research in the areas of Operating Systems, Storage Systems, Memory Systems, and Systems Architecture. We analyze/benchmark, hack, design, and build systems to explore better systems support for modern/emerging {compute,storage,memory} x {hardware,interfaces,applications} for improved {performance,resource efficiency,programmability}. Our research themes are:

Our research have won prestigious awards (here), generated real-world impact with production deployment in data centers and up-streaming to the official Linux kernel. We maintain FEMU, a storage research platform widely used in the research community. All of our research are open-sourced.

For most up-to-date information, please refer to Huaicheng's CV.

Prospective students: I'm looking for students to join my group. Please check the detailed opening information here. If you're interested, please fill in this form and send me an email (as a reminder).


Students

I have the honor to work with the following amazing students:

Current PhD students

  • Jinshu Liu (VT CS, started Fall 2022)
  • Current MS students (with thesis)

  • Subhalakshmi Ramakrishnapuram Selvanathan (VT ECE, started Fall 2022)
  • Extended group members:

  • Hamid Hadian (VT ECE PhD, co-advised with Changwoo Min, started Fall 2022)
  • Yuze Li (VT CS PhD, co-advised with Ali Butt, started Fall 2021)
  • Nirjhar Mukherjee (CMU CS PhD, co-advised with George Amvrosiadis, started Fall 2021)
  • Yuyue Wang (UCLA CS PhD, co-advised, started Fall 2021)
  • Publications

    ASPLOS'23 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] [code]
    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
    artifact-available artifact-available
    [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.
    artifact-available artifact-available artifact-available
    [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
    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.

    Dissertation

    Evolving Storage Stack for Predictability and Efficiency
    Ph.D. Thesis, University of Chicago. Nomination for ACM SIGOPS Dissertation Award (1 per department)
    Huaicheng Li

    Teaching

  • CS6214: Advanced Topics in Operating Systems (Spring 2023), Virginia Tech
  • CS3214: Computer Systems (Fall 2022), Virginia Tech
  • Selected Honors & Awards

  • SYSTOR'22 Best Paper Award ("Fantastic SSD Internals")
  • Distinguished Reviewer Award, SYSTOR'21
  • FAST'18 Best Paper Nominee ("Fail-Slow At Scale")
  • FAST'17 Best Paper Nominee ("Tiny-Tail Flash")
  • Service

    Program Committee (PC)

  • NSDI'24, ASPLOS'24
  • ASPLOS'23 (Fall cycle), SYSTOR'23, NVMW'23
  • APSys'21, SYSTOR'21
  • External Review Committee (ERC)

  • ASPLOS'23 (Spring and Summer cycles)
  • Journal Reviewing

  • TOS, TOCS, TPDS, TC, JPDS, CACM, IEEE Micro, etc.
  • Open-source Software

    Please check the github (here) for a complete of open-source projects from my group. Several example projects below.

  • Pond: CXL-Based Memory Pooling Systems for Cloud Platforms Star Fork
  • IODA: A Host/Device Co-Design for I/O Determinism on Modern Flash Storage, Star Fork
  • LeapIO: A Framework for Efficient Storage Offloading to ARM SoCs, Star Fork
  • FEMU: Fast, Accurate, Scalable and Extensible NVMe SSD Emulator, Star Fork
  • MittSSD: OS Support for Millisecond-level Tail Tolerance, Star
  • ttFlash: A Flash Storage Architecture Design for Tiny Tail Latencies, Star Fork