Contact Information
Engineering 2
University of California, Santa Cruz
ude.cscu@ztilh

Welcome to my webpage! I am an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science & Engineering (CSE) Department of the Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California Santa Cruz and the Associate Director of the Center for Research in Storage Systems (CRSS). I am also a member of UCSC's Hardware Systems Collective (HSC). My main research interests are in Computer Architecture, Operating Systems and Storage with a focus on data centers. My work addresses the unique challenges of data center systems, such as extreme scale, the insatiable need for higher performance at lower cost and the performance predictability of multi-tenancy systems. I am also interested in machine learning and its application to processor microarchitecture and systems. Before joining UCSC, I was a researcher at Google and a Postdoc at Stanford University where I worked with Christos Kozyrakis and David Cheriton. I received my PhD from Mannheim University.

I am looking for great PhD and MS students to join my lab. If you are interested, please get in contact with me.

I have an open Postdoc position. If you are interested in data center storage systems or machine learning techniques to improve micro architecture and Operating Systems please get in contact with me.

News

  • May 2021: Received grants from Google and Facebook - Thank you!
  • April 2021: I am serving on the MICRO PC
  • March 2021: Papers accepted at ISCA, TOS, SYSTOR, ICDE
  • October 2020: I am serving on the ISCA and Usenix ATC PCs
  • September 2020: Surim Oh joins the lab - Welcome!
  • August 2020: SSD Failure prediction accepted at SoCC!
  • July 2020: I-SPY accepted at MICRO!
  • June 2020: Learning SSD accesses accepted at ECML!
  • March 2020: Received a grant from Samsung - Thank you!
  • February 2020: I am serving on the MICRO and SoCC PCs
  • December 2019: I received the NSF CAREER award - thank you NSF! More infos here: PRESS RELEASE.
  • Januar 2020: AsmDB has been selected as an IEEE Top Pick of 2019!
  • December 2019: Dataflow paper accepted at ASPLOS!
  • December 2019: I am serving on the Open Compute (OCP) PC, submit your work here.
  • September 2019: I am serving as the guest editor for the IEEE MICRO Special Issue on Machine Learning for Systems. Submit your best work here.
  • September 2019: Facebook joins CRSS as a new member - welcome!
  • August 2019: SSP accepted at MICRO!
  • July 2019: Serving on the Usenix ATC PC
  • June 2019: Serving on the SoCC PC
  • March 2019: AsmDB accepted at ISCA!
  • March 2019: Serving on the MICRO and HotOS PC
  • Januar 2019: Press release of our collaboration with WD
  • December 2018: Organized the IAP UCSC-Stanford Cloud Workshop
  • September 2018: Received a FoMR grant from NSF!
  • September 2018: Received a grant from Intel!
  • September 2018: Received a grant from Western Digital!
  • September 2018: Welcome Saba, Minghao, Peter & Jayanth
  • July 2018: Serving on the HPCA-IS and ICPADS PC
  • May 2018: Learning Memory Access Patterns paper accepted at ICML!
  • April 2018: Selecta paper accepted at Usenix ATC!
  • April 2018: Received a grant from NXP. Thank you!
  • March 2018: ReFlex on ACM Sigarch
  • March 2018: Learning Memory Access Patterns on MIT Technology Review
  • Februar 2018: Serving on the PPoPP'19 PC
  • Februar 2018: Selecta Poster at SysML
  • Januar 2018: Grazelle Paper accepted at PPoPP'18!
  • Januar 2018: Serving on the SoCC'18 PC
  • December 2017: Received a grant from Samsung. Thank you!
  • October 2017: Received a grant from Broadcom. Thank you!
  • September 2017: Received a donation from CNEX Labs. Thank you!
  • March 2017: ReFlex on The Next Platform

Teaching

Office Hours (for Winter 2020)

  • Tuesday 10:30-11:30 am
  • Thursday 2:30-3:30 pm

Students


  • Chandranil Chakraborttii (PhD)
  • Saba Jamilan (PhD)
  • Minghao Xie (PhD), co-advised with Chen Qian
  • Peter Braun (PhD)
  • Yuanjiang Ni (PhD), co-advised with Ethan Miller
  • Pete Wilcox (PhD)
  • Hany Fahmy (PhD)
  • Lokesh Jaliminiche (PhD)
  • Surim Oh (PhD)
  • Sachet Mittal (MSc)
  • Maxwell Bradley (MSc)
  • Kartik Rajesh Kain(MSc)

Publications

  • Tanvir Ahmed Khan, Dexin Zhang, Akshitha Sriraman, Joseph Devietti, Gilles Pokam, Heiner Litz, Baris Kasikci
    Ripple: Profile-Guided Instruction Cache Replacement for Data Center Applications
    in the 48th International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), 2021
    [PDF]
  • Heiner Litz, Javier Gonzalez, Ana Klimovic, Christos Kozyrakis
    RAIL: Predictable, Low Tail Latency for NVMe Flash
    ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS), 2021
    [PDF]
  • Chandranil Chackraborttii, Heiner Litz
    Reducing Write Amplification in Flash by Death-time Prediction of Logical Block Addresses
    in the 14th International System and Storage Conference (SYSTOR), 2021
    [PDF]
  • Saeed Kargar, Heiner Litz, Faisal Nawab
    Predict and Write: Using K-Means Clustering to Extend the Lifetime of NVM Storage
    in the 37th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), 2021
    [PDF]
  • Tanvir Ahmed Khan, Akshitha Sriraman, Joseph Devietti, Gilles Pokam, Heiner Litz, Baris Kasikci
    I-SPY: Context-Driven Conditional Instruction Prefetching with Coalescing
    in the 53nd Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO), 2020
    [PDF]
  • Chandranil Chakraborttii, Heiner Litz
    Improving the Accuracy, Adaptability, and Interpretability of SSD Failure Prediction Models
    in the ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing 2020 (SoCC), 2020
    [PDF]
  • Chandranil Chakraborttii, Heiner Litz
    Learning I/O Access patterns to Improve Prefetching in SSDs
    in the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML-PKDD), 2020
    [PDF][CODE]
  • Nayana Prasad Nagendra, Grant Ayers, David I. August, Hyoun Kyu Cho, Svilen Kanev, Christos Kozyrakis, Trivikram Krishnamurthy, Heiner Litz, Tipp Moseley, Parthasarathy Ranganathan
    AsmDB: Understanding and Mitigating Front-end Stalls in Warehouse-Scale Computers
    IEEE Micro, Top Picks of 2019
    [PDF]
  • Grant Ayers, Heiner Litz, Christos Kozyrakis, Parthasarathy Ranganathan
    Classifying Memory Access Patterns for Prefetching
    in the 25th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS'25), 2020
    [PDF]
  • Yuanjiang Ni, Jishen Zhao, Heiner Litz, Daniel Bittman, Ethan L. Miller
    SSP: Eliminating Redundant Writes in Failure-Atomic NVRAMs via Shadow Sub-Paging
    in the 52nd Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO), 2019
    [PDF]
  • Grant Ayers, Nayana Prasad Nagendra, David I. August, Hyoun Kyu Cho, Svilen Kanev, Christos Kozyrakis, Trivikram Krishnamurthy, Heiner Litz, Tipp Moseley, Parthasarathy Ranganathan
    AsmDB: Understanding and Mitigating Front-end Stalls in Warehouse-Scale Computers
    in the 46th International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), 2019
    [PDF]
  • Milad Hashemi, Kevin Swersky, Jamie A. Smith, Grant Ayers, Heiner Litz, Jichuan Chang, Christos Kozyrakis, Parthasarathy Ranganathan
    Learning Memory Access Patterns
    in the 35th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2018
    [PDF]
  • Ana Klimovic, Heiner Litz, Christos Kozyrakis
    Selecta: Learning Heterogeneous Cloud Storage Configuration for Data Analytics
    in the 2018 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX'18), 2018
    [PDF]
  • Samuel Grossman, Heiner Litz, Christos Kozyrakis
    Making Pull-Based Graph Processing Performant
    in the 23rd ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP'23), 2018
    [PDF][CODE]
  • Ana Klimovic, Heiner Litz, Christos Kozyrakis
    ReFlex: Remote Flash == Local Flash
    in the 22nd International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS'22), 2017
    [PDF][CODE]
  • Heiner Litz, Benjamin Braun, David Cheriton
    EXCITE-VM: Extending the Virtual Memory System to Support Snapshot Isolation Transactions
    in the 25th International Confernce on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT'25), 2016
    [PDF]
  • Heiner Litz, Ricardo J. Dias, David Cheriton
    Efficient Correction of Anomalies in Snapshot Isolation Transactions
    in ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization (TACO), 2015
    [PDF]
  • Heiner Litz, David Cheriton, Amin Firozshahian, Omid Azizi, J. Peter Stevenson
    SI-TM: Improving Transactional Memory Abort Rates through Snapshot Isolation
    in Proceedings of the 19th Internation Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS'19), March 2014
    [PDF]
  • Bo Wang, Heiner Litz, David Cheriton
    HICAMP Bitmap: Space-efficient Updatable Bitmap Index for In-memory Databases
    In 10th International Workshop on Data Management on New Hardware (DAMON'10), June 2014
    [PDF]
  • Michael Chan, Heiner Litz, David Cheriton
    Rethinking Network Stack Design with Memory Snapshots
    in Proceedings of the 14th Usenix Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS'14)
    [PDF]
  • Holger Fröning, Mondrian Nüssle, Heiner Litz, Christian Leber and Ulrich Brüning
    On Achieving High Message Rates
    in Proceedings of the 13th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing (CCGrid-2013), May 13-16, 2013, Delft, The Netherlands
    [PDF]
  • Heiner Litz, Christian Leber, Benjamin Geib
    DSL Programmable Engine for High Frequency Trading Acceleration
    in Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on High Performance Computational Finance (WHPCF-2011), co-located with SC11, November 13th, 2011, Seattle, USA
    [PDF]
  • Christian Leber, Benjamin Geib, Heiner Litz
    High Frequency Trading Acceleration using FPGAs
    in Proceedings of the 21rd International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL'21), September 5-7, 2011, Chania, Greece
    [PDF]
  • Heiner Litz, Maximilian Thürmer, Ulrich Brüning
    TCCluster: A Cluster Architecture Utilizing the Processor Host Interface as a Network Interconnect
    in Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing (CLUSTER), September 20-24, 2010, Heraklion, Greece
    [PDF]
  • Holger Fröning and Heiner Litz
    Efficient Hardware Support for the Partitioned Global Address Space
    in Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Communication Architecture for Clusters (IPDPSW), co-located with the 24th International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2010), April 19, 2010, Atlanta, Georgia
    [PDF]
  • Heiner Litz, Holger Fröning, Maximilian Thürmer, Ulrich Brüning
    An FPGA based Verification Platform for HyperTransport 3.x
    in Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL'19), August 31 - September 2, 2009, Prag, Czech Republic
    [PDF]
  • Heiner Litz, Holger Fröning, Ulrich Brüning
    A HyperTransport 3 Physical Layer Interface for FPGAs
    in Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Applied Reconfigurable Computing (ARC'6) , March 16 - 18, 2009, Karlsruhe, Germany
    [PDF]
    Best paper award!
  • Holger Fröning, Heiner Litz, Ulrich Brüning
    Efficient Virtualization of Network Interfaces
    in Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Networks (ICN'8), March 1-6, 2009, Guadeloupe/France
    [PDF]
  • Benjamin Kalisch, Alexander Giese, Heiner Litz, Ulrich Brüning
    HyperTransport 3 Core: A Next Generation Host Interface with Extremely High Bandwidth
    in Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on HyperTransport Research and Applications (WHTRA-2009), February 12th, 2009, Mannheim, Germany
    [PDF]
  • Heiner Litz, Holger Fröning, Mondrian Nüssle,  Ulrich Brüning
    VELO: A Novel Communication Engine for Ultra-low Latency Message Transfers
    In Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP-2008), Sep. 8 - 12, 2008, Portland, USA
    Best paper award!
    [PDF]
  • Mondrian Nüssle, Holger Fröning, Alexander Giese, Heiner Litz, David Slogsnat, Ulrich Brüning
    A Hypertransport based low-latency reconfigurable testbed for message-passing developments
    in Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop Kommunikation in Clusterrechnern und Clusterverbundsystemen (KiCC'07), TU Chemnitz, February 2007.
  • Holger Fröning, Mondrian Nüssle, David Slogsnat, Heiner Litz, Ulrich Brüning
    The HTX-Board: A Rapid Prototyping Station
    in Proceedings of the 3rd annual FPGAworld Conference (FPGA-2006), Nov. 16, 2006, Stockholm, Sweden.
  • Yun Ding, Heiner Litz
    Creating Multiplatform User Interfaces by Annotation and Adaptation'
    Proceedings of International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI'11), Sydney, Australia, 29 January 2006 -- 1 February 2006
  • Yun Ding, Heiner Litz, Dennis Pfisterer
    A graphical single-authoring framework for building multi-platform user interfaces
    Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Aided Design of User Interfaces (CADUI), held with the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI'9), Funchal, Portugal, 14-16 January 2004
  • Yun Ding, Heiner Litz, Rainer Malaka and Dennis Pfisterer
    On Programming Information Agent Systems - An Integrated Hotel Reservation Service as Case Study
    Proceedings of the first German Conference on Multiagent System Technologies (MATES'03), 2003

Support


Our group's research is generously supported by -- NSF, Western Digital, Intel, Samsung, Broadcom, NXP, CNEX Labs