Industry Retreat 2026
The Industry Retreat 2026 will take place from the 11th to the 14th of January 2026 at the Hotel Bellevue-Terminus, Engelberg.
Location
The Systems Group’s Industry Retreat 2026 will be held at the external page Hotel Bellevue-Terminus, Engelberg.
Program
Sunday, 11th January
18:30 – 19.30 Dinner
19:30 – 20:00 Introductory session: Welcome, introduction, logistics, agenda,
format, etc.
20:00 – 20:30 Invited talk: Eric Brewer (Google & UC Berkeley) "Security menagerie"
(working title)
20:30 – 21:00 Q&A Systems Group Overview
Monday, 12th January
8:00 – 9:00 Breakfast
9:00 – 10:30 Session 1 (Chair: Ana Klimovic)
Invited Talk: Yannis Chronis (ETH Zurich) “Breaking the Relational Wall:
Semantic Data Processing”
Talk 1 Maximus: Modular Accelerated Data Analytics in the Era of
Heterogeneous Hardware – Marko Kabić
Talk 2 End-to-End Declarative Cloud Data Analytics – Tom Kuchler
& Tobias Stocker
Talk 3 Vector Search in Maximus – Vasilis Mageirakos
10:30 – 11:00 Coffee Break
11:00 – 12:30 Session 2 (Chair: Gustavo Alonso)
Invited Talk: Christos Kozyrakis (NVIDIA) “The pursuit of speed of light”
Talk 1 Eiger: An Efficient GPU-based Query Processing Engine – Bowen Wu
Talk 2 Lightweight service mesh – Lazar Cvetkovic
Talk 3 Understanding GPU interference one level deeper – Foteini Strati
12:30 Lunch
Meetings, free time
17:00 – 18:30 Session 3 (Chair: Timothy Roscoe)
Invited Talk: Michaela Blott (AMD) “The Next Wave in AI: From Hype to
Hardware Reality”
Talk 1 A language for analyzing hardware and its documentation
– Ben Fiedler
Talk 2 Verifying OS code against formal ISA specs – Sam Grütter
Talk 3 Principled OS design for real hardware – Roman Meier
19:00 Dinner
20:00~ Poster Session
Tuesday, 13th January
8:00 – 9:00 Breakfast
9:00 – 10:30 Session 4 (Chair: Yannis Chronis)
Invited Talk: Zhengping Qian (Alibaba) “Building Foundation Models at
Scale: System Experiences and Challenges”
Talk 1 Data Mixing and Loading for LLM/VLM Training – Maximilian Böther
Talk 2 SwissAI Serving Platform and Test-time Adaptation – Xiaozhe Yao
Talk 3 Rethinking the Data and Communication Plane for AI Infrastructure
– Yu Zhu
10:30 – 11:00 Coffee Break
11:00 – 12:30 Session 5 (Chair: Michal Friedman)
Invited Talk: Andrew Putnam (Microsoft) “Data Movement, Not Compute:
The Real Limits of Acceleration in Hyperscale Clouds”
Talk 1 Coyote v2.1: A platform for building next-generation hardware
and systems –Benjamin Ramhorst
Talk 2 SCENIC: A Stream Computation Enhanced NIC for
modern workloads –Maximilian Heer
Talk 3 Lauberhorn: an ultra-low overhead NIC – Pengcheng Xu
12:30 Lunch
Meetings, free time
17:00 – 18:30 Session 6 (Chair: Sam Grütter)
Invited Talk: Daniel Ritter (SAP) “Composable Data Systems in the Wild
and How to Tame Them”
Talk 1 CXL-based Hash Joins and Data Placement – Moritz Lumme
Talk 2 Resilient Distributed Systems – Yazhuo Zhang
Talk 3 Data processing acceleration – Jonas Dann
19:00 Dinner
20:00~ Poster Session
Wednesday, 14th January
8:00 – 9:00 Breakfast
9:00 – 10:30 Session 7 (Chair: Jonas Dann)
Invited Talk: Ismail Oukid (Snowflake) “Re-envisioning Compute and
Workload Optimization at Snowflake (and Problems Worth Solving)”
Talk 1 Implications of non-coherent shared memory – Jasmin Schult
Talk 2 New Powerful Instructions (MWCAS) – Hang Hu &
Yevhen Khavrona
Talk 3 How to flexibly program far memory – Zikai Liu
10:30 – 11:00 Coffee Break
11:00 – 12:30 Open session, brainstorming, and feedback
12:30 Lunch
14:02 Departure: Group train for Zurich