Computing Platforms
Content
The seminar will cover core concepts and ideas in the general area of computer systems, ranging from software and hardware architectures to system design for operating systems, data processing systems, and distributed systems. This course will focus on fundamental ideas that apply across systems and applications with an emphasis on those ideas for cloud platforms and hardware accelerators.
Format
The seminar will consist of student presentations based on a list of papers that will be provided at the beginning of the course. Presentations will be arranged in slots of 20 minutes talk plus 10 minutes questions. Grades will be assigned based on quality of the presentation, coverage of the topic including material not in the original papers, participation during the seminar, and ability to understand, present, and criticize the underlying technology.
Seminar Hours
Mondays, 4-6pm, at CHN D 44. The first seminar will be on February 16th, 2026.
Lecturers
- Prof. Gustavo Alonso
- Dr. Shien Zhu
Schedule
Papers
Each student will select one paper for this list (subject to changes by the first week). You may need the ETH network (via VPN) to click on the links to get the full-text papers.
Cloud Computing
1. Qiu, Ziyue, et al. "Moirai: Optimizing Placement of Data and Compute in Hybrid Clouds." In SOSP 2025. [external page Link]
2. Agrawal, Kapil, and Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi. "Cooperative Graceful Degradation in Containerized Clouds." In ASPLOS 2025. [external page Link]
3. Xiong, Yifan, et al. "SuperBench: A Proactive Validation System for Improving Reliability of Cloud AI Infrastructure." In ACM TOCS (2025). [external page Link]
4. Gan, Xinbiao, et al. "TianheEngine: Hierarchy-aware Adaptive Partitioning System for Trillion-scale Graph Processing." In SC 2025. [external page Link]
5. Schleier-Smith, Johann, et al. (2021) "What Serverless Computing is and Should Become: The Next Phase of Cloud Computing." In Communications of the ACM. [external page Link]
Database Systems
6. Li, Qian, et al. "DBOS: Three Years Later." In VLDB Journal (2025). [external page Link]
7. Bacon, D. F., Bales, N., Bruno, N., et al. (2017). Spanner: Becoming a SQL System. In SIGMOD. [external page Link]
8. X. Yang, et al. (2024). PolarDB-MP: A Multi-Primary Cloud-Native Database via Disaggregated Shared Memory. In SIGMOD. [external page Link]
9. Zhang, Fangyuan, et al. "AnalyticDB-PG: A Cloud-Native High-Performance Data Warehouse in Alibaba Cloud." In VLDB 2025. [external page Link]
10. Liu, Guangda, et al. "DHAP: Towards Efficient OLAP in a Disaggregated and Heterogeneous Environment." In SC 2025. [external page Link]
11. Gubner, Tim, Rune Humborstad, and Manyi Lu. "Freely Moving between the OLTP and OLAP Worlds: Hermes-An High-Performance OLAP Accelerator for MySQL." In VLDB 2025. [external page Link]
12. Zhang, Hanze, et al. "Accelerating Million-scale In-network Lock Management using Lock Fission." In ACM TOCS (2025). [external page Link]
Computer Interconnects
13. H. Li, et al. (2023) Pond: CXL-Based Memory Pooling Systems for Cloud Platforms. In ASPLOS. [external page Link]
14. H. Al Maruf, et al. (2023) TPP: Transparent Page Placement for CXL-Enabled Tiered-Memory. In ASPLOS. [external page Link]
15. Wang, Xi, et al. "cMPI: Using CXL Memory Sharing for MPI One-Sided and Two-Sided Inter-Node Communications." In SC 2025. [external page Link]
16. Laskar, Sabuj, et al. "SuperMesh: Energy-Efficient Collective Communications for Accelerators." In MICRO 2025. [external page Link]
17. Karpathiotakis, Manos, et al. "Scribe: How Meta Transports Terabytes per Second in Real Time." In VLDB 2025. [external page Link]
Hardware Acceleration
18. Quinn, Derrick, et al. "Accelerating Retrieval-Augmented Generation." In ASPLOS 2025. [external page Link]
19. Wan, Borui, et al. "Robust LLM Training Infrastructure at ByteDance." In SOSP 2025. [external page Link]
20. Pan, Yue, et al. "Stratum: System-Hardware Co-Design with Tiered Monolithic 3D-Stackable DRAM for Efficient MoE Serving." In MICRO 2025. [external page Link]
21. Xia, Tianhua, and Sai Qian Zhang. "Kelle: Co-design KV Caching and eDRAM for Efficient LLM Serving in Edge Computing." In MICRO 2025. [external page Link]
22. Van Delm, Josse, et al. "The Configuration Wall: Characterization and Elimination of Accelerator Configuration Overhead." In ASPLOS 2026. [external page Link]
23. Wu, Qizhe, et al. "MHE-TPE: Multi-Operand High-Radix Encoder for Mixed-Precision Fixed-Point Tensor Processing Engines." In MICRO 2025. [external page Link]
OS and AI for Systems
24. Li, Hongyu, et al. "Rust Meets Linux: Lessons from an Evolving Experiment." In ACM TOCS (2026). [external page Link]
25. Ding, Yaoyao, et al. "Tilus: A Tile-Level GPGPU Programming Language for Low-Precision Computation." In ASPLOS 2026. [external page Link]
26. Xu, Jiahui, and Lana Josipovic. "CRUSH: A Credit-Based Approach for Functional Unit Sharing in Dynamically Scheduled HLS." In ASPLOS 2025. [external page Link]
27. Jiang, Jie, et al. "SiriusBI: A Comprehensive LLM-Powered Solution for Data Analytics in Business Intelligence." In VLDB 2025. [external page Link]
28. Zhao, Yang, et al. "CodeV: Empowering LLMs with HDL Generation through Multi-Level Summarization." In IEEE TCAD (2025). [external page Link]
Presentations Tips