Vic Shihang Li

shli[at]cs[dot]uw[dot]edu

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

2025-04I presented our work Quicksand, a new programming framework that unstrands datacenter resources, at NSDI '25 and at Brown.

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

22nd USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI '25)

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:

CSCI 0300: Fundamentals of Computer Systems @ Brown
CSCI 1760: Multiprocessor Synchronization @ Brown
STAT-GB.2308.10: Stochastic Processes @ NYU

I am also an instructor for CSE 492R @ UW, a program designed to make research more accessible to undergraduates. In this class, I teach and mentor undergraduate students on a project closely related to my research.