Vic Shihang Li's profile picture.

Vic Shihang Li

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Hello there! I'm Vic, a second-year CS PhD student at the University of Washington. I am a part of the Computer Systems Lab, advised by Simon Peter and Tom Anderson. I also collaborate with other faculty in the lab, such as Arvind Krishnamurthy and Ratul Mahajan.

I design systems for emerging datacenter computing trends. My latest work improves datacenter application resource efficiency with HW/SW co-design and scheduling.

Before UW, I worked with Malte Schwarzkopf and Adam Belay as a member of the ETOS group at Brown. Before that, I studied Finance and CS as an undergraduate at NYU Stern School of Business.

News

2025-01I will be joining Microsoft Research Redmond as a research intern this summer!
2024-11I presented our ongoing work Masa, a new RPC system designed for improving microservice SLO compliance, at the SySDW '24 workshop.
2024-07Quicksand has been accepted to NSDI '25. Stay tuned for more detail!
2024-06A demo paper showcasing our system Mach has been accepted to VLDB '24!
2023-09I have started my PhD at the University of Washington!
2023-06I am a student volunteer at HotOS '23. See you there!
2023-05I have graduated from Brown! Many thanks to Malte and everyone who supported me along the way.

Publications

Quicksand: Harnessing Stranded Datacenter Resources with Granular Computing
Zhenyuan Ruan, Shihang Li, Kaiyan Fan, Marcos K. Aguilera, Adam Belay, Seo Jin Park, Malte Schwarzkopf
NSDI '25 (To Appear)
Mach: Firefighting Time-Critical Issues in Complex Systems Using High-Frequency Telemetry
Franco Solleza, Shihang Li, William Sun, Richard Tang, Malte Schwarzkopf, Nesime Tatbul, Andrew Crotty, David Cohen, Stan Zdonik
50th International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB '24, Demo Track)
Unleashing True Utility Computing with Quicksand
Zhenyuan Ruan, Shihang Li, Kaiyan Fan, Marcos K. Aguilera, Adam Belay, Seo Jin Park, Malte Schwarzkopf
The 19th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS '23)

Services

  • Pre-PhD applicant mentor for the 2024 cycle, via the PAMS program at UW CSE.
  • Mentor for first-year PhD students in the 2024-25 academic year.
  • Member of EuroSys '25 Shadow PC.

Teaching

I find teaching deeply rewarding. I have TAed for the following courses:

Fun

I enjoy taking pictures, snowboarding, road trips, and a healthy dose of metaprogramming :)

Below are some photos I took on my cross-country roadtrip from New York to Seattle in the summer of 2023.

Lately I have been shooting with prime lenses exclusively. Here're some 35mm shots: