About


 Huaicheng Li
Assistant Professor, Virginia Tech CS
Office: Gilbert Place 4109
Email: huaicheng@cs.vt.edu
Code: Personal, Group
Google Scholar | DBLP
Curriculum Vitae: [pdf]

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). Prior to that, I gained some valuable industry experience through internships with Microsoft Research (3x) and NetApp.

My research group specializes in fundamental Computer Systems research, specifically in the areas of 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

Our research has garnered prestigious awards (here), and has been implemented in real-world data centers and integrated into the official Linux kernel. We maintain FEMU, a widely adopted storage research platform in the academic community. All of our research is open-source.

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

Prospective students: I am currently seeking students to join my research group. Please refer to the detailed opening information provided here. If you are interested, kindly fill out the form and send me an email as a reminder.


Students

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

PhD students

MS students (with thesis)


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]
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.
===========
 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

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

Teaching


Selected Honors & Awards


Service

Program Committee (PC)

External Review Committee (ERC)

Journal Reviewing


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: