I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I am also an Affiliated Researcher at VMware Research. My research interests are in distributed systems, storage and file systems. I co-direct the Distributed And Storage Systems Laboratory (DASSL) at UIUC. At DASSL, we focus on rethinking systems for emerging hardware, building new distributed protocols for modern environments, and leveraging ML to improve system performance.

My work on distributed storage reliability has exposed many severe bugs in popular distributed systems. Ideas from my research on corruption-tolerant replication are implemented in a financial database. My work has appeared in top systems venues such as OSDI, SOSP, and FAST and has been recognized with best-paper awards at FAST 20 and FAST 18 and a best paper award nomination at FAST 17. I was selected for the Rising Stars in EECS workshop and a recipient of Facebook 2019 PhD Fellowship.

Previously, I was a postdoctoral researcher at VMware Research Group. I earned my PhD in Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, working with Prof. Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau and Prof. Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau. Prior to starting my Ph.D., I was a Research Fellow at Microsoft Research India in the Mobility, Networks, and Systems group. Before that, I graduated with a master’s degree from Indian Institute of Technology – Bombay.

I am looking for PhD and Masters students interested in systems to work with me.
If you are a student at UIUC reach out to me. If you are a prospective, please apply to the UIUC CS graduate program and mention my name in the application.

Recent News:

• Feb 2024:Excited to share that I was awarded the NSF CAREER Award!
• May 2023: Will be on the OSDI '24 program committee.
• Mar 2023: Will be on the Eurosys '24 program committee.
• Mar 2023: Will be on the FAST '24 program committee.
• Feb 2023: Will be on the APSys '23 program committee.
• Jan 2023: Teaching a graduate course on fault-tolerant and consistent data center systems (CS 598FTS)
• Jan 2023: I made it onto the List of Teachers Ranked as Outstanding By Their Students for Fall 2022
• Jan 2023: Invited to serve on the HotStorage '23 program committee.
• Dec 2022: Will be on the NVMW '23 program committee.
• Dec 2022: Will be co-organizing the Doctoral workshop at SOSP'23 .
• Sep 2022: Will be on the SYSTOR '23 program committee.
• Aug 2022: Teaching a graduate course on ML for Systems (CS 598AWG) in Fall 2022
• Aug 2022: I am starting as an Assistant Professor at UIUC CS.
• Jun 2022: Invited to serve on the SOCC '22 program committee.
• May 2022: Invited to serve on the OSDI '23 program committee.
• May 2022: Will be co-chairing FAST '23 poster and work-in-progress session.
• Mar 2022: Sieve has been accepted at OSDI '22

CS 425: Distributed systems (Fall '23) (co-teaching with Indranil Gupta)
CS 591 SN: Systems and Networking Seminar (Fall '23) (Co-organizing w/ Ramnatthan Alagappan, Indranil Gupta, and Tianyin Xu)
CS 598 FTS: Fault-tolerant and consistent data center systems (Spring '23)
CS 591 SN: Systems and Networking Seminar (Spring '23) (Co-organizing w/ Ramnatthan Alagappan, Indranil Gupta, and Tianyin Xu)
CS 598 AWG: ML for Systems (Fall '22) List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent By Their Students
CS 591 SN: Systems and Networking Seminar (Fall '22) (Co-organizing w/ Ramnatthan Alagappan, Indranil Gupta, and Tianyin Xu)
CS 739: Distributed Systems (Spring ’20) (UW Madison) Graduate Student Instructor Award

• aganesn2 AT illinois DOT edu