Cheng Li

[Biography]           [Selected Publications]           [Academic Activities]           [Awards]           [Courses]           [Students]          

I am a pre-tenured research professor at the School of Computer Science and Technology at University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) and a member of the Advanced Data Systems Lab (ADSL). Prior to joining USTC, I was an associated researcher with my PhD supervisor Rodrigo Rodrigues at INESC-ID, Portugal, and a senior member of technical staff at Oracle Labs Swiss. In 2016, I obtained my PhD degree from the Dependable Systems Group at the Max Planck Institute for Software Sytems (MPI-SWS) and Saarland University in Germany. Before studying at MPI-SWS, I obtained my bachelor degree from Nankai University in 2009.

My research interests lie in various topics related to computer systems such as operating systems, distributed systems, databases and etc, particularly in improving performance, consistency, fault tolerance, and availability of the above mentioned systems.

1. Jingbo Su, Jiahao Li, Luofan Chen, Cheng Li, Kai Zhang, Liang Yang, Sam H. Noh, Yinlong Xu, Revitalizing the Forgotten On-Chip DMA to Expedite Data Movement in NVM-based Storage Systems, To appear in the proceedings of the 21st USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '23) , 2023. [PDF]
2. Quan Zhou, Haiquan Wang, Xiaoyan Yu, Cheng Li, Youhui Bai, Feng Yan, Yinlong Xu, MPress: Democratizing Billion-Scale Model Training on Multi-GPU Servers via Memory-Saving Inter-Operator Parallelism, To appear in the proceedings of the 29th IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA'23), 2023. [PDF]
3. Shixiong Zhao, Fanxin Li, Xusheng Chen, Tianxiang Shen, Li Chen, Sen Wang, Gong Zhang, Cheng Li, Heming Cui, NASPipe: High Performance and Reproducible Pipeline Parallel Supernet Training via Causal Synchronous Parallel, In the proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS '22), 2022. [PDF]
4. Youhui Bai, Cheng Li, Quan Zhou, Jun Yi, Ping Gong, Feng Yan, Ruichuan Chen, Yinlong Xu, Gradient Compression Supercharged High-Performance Data Parallel DNN Training, In the proceedings of the 28th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), 2021. [PDF]
5. Yiduo Wang, Cheng Li, Xinyang Shao, Youxu Chen, Feng Yan, Yinlong Xu, Lunule: An Agile and Judicious Metadata Load Balancer for CephFS, In the proceedings of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC), 2021. [PDF]
6. Yingqiang Zhang, Chaoyi Ruan, Cheng Li, Jimmy Yang, Wei Cao, Feifei Li, Bo Wang, Jing Feng, Yuhui Wang, Jingze Huo, Chao Bi, Towards Cost-Effective and Elastic Cloud Database Deployment via Memory Disaggregation, In the proceedings of the 47th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), 2021. [PDF]
7. Jiawei Wang, Cheng Li, Kai Ma, Jingze Huo, Feng Yan, Xinyu Feng, Yinlong Xu, AutoGR: Automated Geo-Replication with Fast System Performance and Preserved Application Semantics, In the proceedings of the 47th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), 2021. [PDF]
8. Shixiong Zhao, Fanxin Li, Xusheng Chen, Xiuxian Guan, Jianyu Jiang, Dong Huang, Yuhao Qing, Sen Wang, Peng Wang, Gong Zhang, Cheng Li, Ping Luo, Heming Cui, vPipe: A Virtualized Acceleration System for Achieving Efficient and Scalable Pipeline Parallel DNN Training , In the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS), 2021. [PDF]
9. Hao Chen, Chaoyi Ruan, Cheng Li, Xiaosong Ma, Yinlong Xu, SpanDB: A Fast, Cost-Effective LSM-tree Based KV Store on Hybrid Storage, In the proceedings of the 19th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST), 2021. [PDF]
10. Zhiqi Lin, Cheng Li, Youshan Miao, Yunxin Liu, Yinlong Xu, PaGraph: Scaling GNN Training on Large Graphs via Computation-aware Caching, In the proceedings of the eleventh ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing 2020 (SOCC), 2020. [PDF]
11. Cheng Li, Nuno Preguica, Rodrigo Rodrigues, Fine-grained Consistency for Geo-Replicated Systems, In the proceedings of the 2018 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC 2018), Boston, MA, USA, 2018. [PDF]
12. Daniel Porto, Joao Leitao, Cheng Li, Aniket Kate, Allen Clement, Flavio Junqueira, Rodrigo Rodrigues,Visigoth Fault Tolerance, In the proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys 2015), Bordeaux, France, 2015. [PDF]
13. Cheng Li, Joao Leitao, Allen Clement, Nuno Preguica, Rodrigo Rodrigues, Viktor Vafeiadis, Automating the Choice of Consistency Levels in Replicated Systems , In the proceedings of the 2014 USENIX Annual Technical Conference(USENIX ATC 2014), Philadelphia, PA, USA, 2014. [PDF]
14. Cheng Li, Daniel Porto, Allen Clement, Johannes Gehrke, Nuno Preguica, Rodrigo Rodrigues, Making Geo-Replicated Systems Fast as Possible, Consistent when Necessary , In the proceedings of the 10th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 2012), Hollywood, CA, USA, 2012. [PDF]
15. Pedro Fonseca, Cheng Li, Rodrigo Rodrigues, Finding Complex Concurrency Bugs in Large Multi-Threaded Applications , In the proceedings of the 2011 European Professional Society on Computer Systems (EuroSys 2011), Salzburg, Austria, 2011. [PDF]

• Board Member:
  • ACM Future of Computing Academy
  • Frontiers of Computer Science (FCS), Junior AE
  • CCF Digital
• Journal Reviewer:
  • IEEE Transactions on Networking
  • ACM Transactions on Storage
  • VLDB Journal
  • Journal of Computer Science and Technology
• PC Member:
  • 2023: Middleware
  • 2022: DSN, HotStorage, APSys
  • 2021: SOSP, GNNSys, DSN, ICDCS, APSys
  • 2020: OSDI(Artifact Evaluation), EuroSys(Shadow PC), ICDCS, APSys, SRDS
  • 2019: SRDS, PaPoC
• Conference/Workshop Organization:
  • Publication Co-chair, ACM SIGMETRICS 2023
  • Publication Co-chair, EuroSys 2021
  • PC Co-chair, ACM TURC 2018 - SIGOPS Symposium/14th ChinaSys Workshop
  • PC Co-chair, ACM SOSP 2017 Poster Session
• Other services:
  • Member, China RISC-V Alliance, since 2019
  • Supervisor, Class of 2018, Undergraduate, USTC-CS, since 2018

• 2022 AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Honorable Mention in Computer Systems (AMiner, 2022)
• ACM China Rising Star Honorable Mention (ACM China, 2021)
• ACM ChinaSys Rising Star (ACM China SIGOPS, 2021)
• First Prize in the 5th Teaching Contest for College Young Teachers in Anhui Province (Anhui Provincial Department of Education, 2021)
• Second Prize in the USTC Young Teachers' Teaching Competition (USTC, 2020)
• HP Young Scientist Award (USTC-HP, 2020)
• StarTrack Fellowship (Microsoft Research Asia, 2020)
• Huawei Teaching Award (USTC-Huawei, 2019)
• Innovative Funding for Returned Overseas Chinese Scholars (Hefei City, 2019-2020)
• Collaborative Research Grant Award (Microsoft Research Asia, 2019)
• Initiative Scholar (The University of Science and Technology of China Initiative Foundation, 2018)
• Award of Excellence for Stars of Tomorrow Internship Program (Microsoft Research Asia, 2016)
• Max Planck Fellowship (Max Planck Society, 2009-2013)
• Excellent bachelor award (Nankai Univeristy, 2009)
• China Government Scholarship (Ministry of Education, 2008)

• Principles and Techniques of Compiler (2020, Fall Semester)
• Principles and Techniques of Compiler (2019, Fall Semester)
• Principles and Techniques of Compiler (2017~Present, Fall Semester)
• USTC-SYS Seminar (2017~Present, Every Semester)

• Current:
  • Yiduo Wang (Doctoral student, since 2020, co-advised with Prof. Yinlong Xu)
  • Guanbin Xu (Doctoral student, since 2020)
  • Quan Zhou (Doctoral student, since 2020)
  • Jingbo Su (Doctoral student, since 2019)
  • Xinyang Shao (Doctoral student, since 2019, co-advised with Prof. Yinlong Xu)
  • Youhui Bai (Doctoral student, since 2018, co-advised with Prof. Yinlong Xu)
  • Chaoyi Ruan (Master student, since 2019)
  • Jiahao Li (Master student, since 2019)
  • Zewen Jin (Master student, since 2019, co-advised with Prof. Yinlong Xu)
  • Jingze Huo (Master student, since 2019)
  • Dongbo Yu (Master student, since 2018)
• Alumi:
  • Jiawei Wang (PhD Candidate at TU Dresden)
  • Youxu Chen (Huawei)
  • Sishuai Gong (PhD Candidate at Purdue University)
  • Ruohui Wang (PhD Candidate at University of Wisconsin-Madison)
  • Xiaoniu Song (Research supervisor, PhD Candidate at IPADS, STJU)