Ram Alagappan
Email: ramn@illinois.edu
Office: 3122 Siebel Center
201 N Goodwin Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
DASSL Research Group
CV | Google Scholar | DBLP
I am a computer systems researcher. My work builds modern systems and data infrastructure that are more reliable, efficient, and fast. My research spans storage, memory, and distributed systems, with an emphasis on building principled yet practical abstractions and designs that keep them reliable and fast.
I earned my PhD in computer systems from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher in the VMware Research Group. From Fall 2022, I have been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where I co-lead the Distributed And Storage Systems Laboratory (DASSL).
Current Research Interests
Our group is currently focusing on a few connected areas:
- Real-time data infrastructure with a focus on applications that demand low latency.
- New fault-tolerant logging abstractions for modern applications.
- CXL memory systems for efficient and correct data sharing.
- Agent-first data infrastructure, a newer direction in which we are building new data abstractions and systems for AI agents.
I am always looking for self-motivated, hardworking, and creative PhD students. If you are interested in systems (OS, memory, storage, distributed systems), please apply to the UIUC CS PhD program and mention my name in the application.
Awards
Research
Best Paper SOSP '24 - LazyLogNSF CAREER Award
Best Paper FAST '20 - CAD
UW CS Graduate Student Research (Best Dissertation Research) Award - Honorable Mention - 2019
Best Paper FAST '18 - PAR/CTRL
Best Paper FAST '17 - CCFS
Best Paper Nominee FAST '17- Redundancy Does Not Imply Fault Tolerance
Teaching
List of Teachers Ranked as Outstanding at UIUC (for CS598 - Storage Systems Fall 2023)List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent at UIUC (for CS598 - Storage Systems Spring 2023)
List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent at UIUC (for CS598 - Storage Systems Fall 2022)
CS 739 ranked 1st among all Spring 20 courses in student evaluations
Nominated for SACM CoW Teaching Award for CS 739
Service
Distinguished Reviewer HotStorage - 2021Best Shadow PC Reviewer Eurosys '19
Grants and Scholarships
IBM-IL Discovery Accelerator Institute (IIDAI) grant 2024MS Azure Credits Research Award for $50,000 - 2019
Facebook Distributed Systems Research Award for $50,000 - 2019
Alumni Scholarship, UW Madison - 2013