TLDR: The review process and publication model for systems research is not optimal in a number of ways. We propose a new diamond-access journal, the Journal of Systems Research (jsys.org) to help improve the current state of affairs. A concrete proposal for the journal is available here. The current state…

I figured it was time for another story of my own. This is the story of the CrashMonkey project, and how it came to be published at OSDI 2018. …

CSRTale #9 comes from two award-winning graduate students in Wisconsin, Ramnatthan Alagappan and Aishwarya Ganesan. Ram and Aishwarya work with Prof. Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau and Prof. Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau in the Advanced Systems Lab. In this CSRTale, they discuss they how started working on distributed-storage reliability at Wisconsin, and lessons learnt along…

CSR Tale #8 comes from Prof. Barzan Mozafari at Michigan. Barzan leads a research group designing the next generation of scalable databases using advanced statistical models. Recently, their VATS lock scheduling algorithm was adopted by MySQL and MariaDB, so I chatted with Barzan on how the VATS work came to…

CSR Tale #7 comes from Prof. Yehia Elkhatib, an Assisstant Professor at Lancaster University, and a visiting professor at École de Technologie Supérieure, Montreal. Yehia works on distributed systems and cloud computing, and is the creator and chair of the international Cross-Cloud workshop series. …

This CSRTale comes from Nipun Batra (post-doc at the University of Virginia), Jack Kelly (researcher at Google DeepMind), and Oliver Parson (Data Scientist at Centrica). The tale starts when all of them were each a PhD student at a different university. It shows how you can often have excellent remote…

I’ve been giving this advice to a number of students over the past few days, and following Matt Might’s advice, I’m penning this down quickly as a blog post. …

I figured it was time I pitched in with a story of my own. This is the story of how our PebblesDB key-value store came to be built and published at SOSP 17. The story also involves my post-doc experience at VMware Research. This story begins in 2015, when I…

It will be interview season for faculty candidates soon, and I thought I would jot down some tips for job interviews in academia/research labs. This is based on attending job interviews in both UT Austin and VMware Research (where I did my post-doc). …