Systems Research Group – Redmond

The Systems Research Group is devoted to advancing the state of the art in distributed systems and operating systems.
Our aim is to make systems secure, scalable, fault-tolerant, manageable, fast, and efficient.
One of the major themes within the group is around Cloud Efficiency.

Careers

We’re always seeking creative, dedicated, smart individuals who are interested in joining us. If you’re an excellent candidate interested in doing cutting-edge systems research at an institution where you can see that research pay off in direct product impact, we encourage you to apply for a position. Whether you’re about to graduate, or you’re already a seasoned researcher interested in exploring alternatives, we’d like to talk to you.
Please apply using our Career Opportunities tab.

If you have questions about our group, feel free to e-mail.

Recent Paper Awards

Jan 2022 | IEEE Micro Top Picks from the 2021 Computer Architecture Conferences
Overclocking in Immersion-Cooled Datacenters
Majid Jalili, Ioannis Manousakis, Íñigo Goiri, Pulkit Misra, Esha Choukse, Ashish Raniwala, Brijesh Warrier, Husam Alissa, Bharath Ramakrishnan, Phillip Tuma, Christian Belady, Marcus Fontoura, and Ricardo Bianchini.
To appear in IEEE Micro, May/June 2022.

Nov 2021 | SC ’21 Best Student Paper
Efficient Large-Scale Language Model Training on GPU Clusters Using Megatron-LM
Deepak Narayanan, Mohammad Shoeybi, Jared Casper, Patrick LeGresley, Mostofa Patwary, Vijay Anand Korthikanti, Dmitri Vainbrand, Prethvi Kashinkunti, Julie Bernauer, Bryan Catanzaro, Amar Phanishayee, Matei Zaharia.
International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC 2021)

Oct 2021 | SOSP ’21 Best Paper Awards
Kangaroo: Caching Billions of Tiny Objects on Flash.
Sara McAllister, Benjamin Berg, Julian Tutuncu-Macias, Juncheng Yang, Sathya Gunasekar, Jimmy Lu, Daniel S. Berger, Nathan Beckmann, Gregory R. Ganger.

Feb 2021 | FAST ’21 USENIX Test of Time Award
A Five-Year Study of File-System Metadata
Nitin Agrawal, William J. Bolosky, John R. Douceur, Jacob R. Lorch
Published in the Proceedings of the 5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, February, 2007

Nov 2020 | SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award for SOSP’09 paper titled
“The Multikernel: A New OS Architecture for Scalable Multicore Systems”
Andrew Baumann, Paul Barham, Pierre-Evariste Dagand, Tim Harris, Rebecca Isaacs, Simon Peter, Timothy Roscoe, Adrian Schüpbach, and Akhilesh Singhania.
The paper introduced the highly influential Barrelfish system.

July 2020 | Community Award
“Serverless in the Wild: Characterizing and Optimizing the Serverless Workload at a Large Cloud Provider” at USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC)
Mohammad Shahrad, Rodrigo Fonseca, Íñigo Goiri, Gohar Irfan Chaudhry, Paul Batum, Jason Cooke, Eduardo Laureano, Colby Tresness, Mark Russinovich, Ricardo Bianchini

June 2020 | Distinguished Paper Award
“Armada: Low-Effort Verification of High-Performance Concurrent Programs” at the ACM International Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI)
Jacob R. Lorch, Yixuan Chen, Manos Kapritsos, Bryan Parno, Shaz Qadeer, Upamanyu Sharma, James R. Wilcox, and Xueyuan Zhao.

October 2019 | Best Paper Award, Distinguished Artifact Award
“Scaling symbolic evaluation for automated verification of systems code with Serval” at 27th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP) Organized by ACM
Luke Nelson, James Bornholt, Ronghui Gu, Andrew Baumann, Emina Torlak, Xi Wang

June 2019 | Best Paper Award
“Storm: a fast transactional dataplane for remote data structures” at 12th ACM International Systems and Storage Conference (SYSTOR) Organized by ACM, USENIX
Stanko Novakovic, Yizhou Shan, Aasheesh Kolli, Michael Cui, Yiying Zhang, Haggai Eran, Boris Pismenny, Liran Liss, Michael Wei, Dan Tsafrir, Marcos Aguilera

June 2019 |  Best Paper Honorable Mention
“Fast General Distributed Transactions with Opacity” at International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD ’19)  Organized by ACM
Alex Shamis, Matthew Renzelmann, Stanko Novakovic, Georgios Chatzopoulos, Aleksandar Dragojevic, Dushyanth Narayanan, Miguel Castro

April 2018 | William Chan Memorial Dissertation Award at University of Washington.
“Distributed Operating Systems for Mobile/Cloud Applications”
Irene Zhang

December 2017  |  Best Student Paper Award at Middleware’17
“Swayam: Distributed Autoscaling to Meet SLAs of Machine Learning Inference Services with Resource Efficiency”
Arpan Gujarati, Sameh Elnikety, Yuxiong He, Kathryn S. McKinley, Björn B. Brandenburg

August 2017  |  Distinguished Paper Award at USENIX Security 2017
“Vale: Verifying High-Performance Cryptographic Assembly Code”
Barry Bond, Chris Hawblitzel, Manos Kapritsos, K. Rustan M. Leino, Jacob R. Lorch, Bryan Parno, Ashay Rane, Srinath Setty, and Laure Thompson