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nitin agrawal

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intro
My background is in the design and implementation of distributed, mobile, and storage systems. I now work at Google. Before, at ThoughtSpot I helped build and launch their enterprise SaaS search engine; at Samsung, I built SummaryStore, an approximate storage system for cost-effective real-time analytics on ''colossal'' data streams, a highly-available data replication service, and a fault-tolerant distributed middleware for reliable smart-home applications. Prior to this, I spent 6 years at NEC Labs where I led the Simba project to develop cloud infrastructure for mobile data management. I graduated with a PhD from Wisconsin with Professors Andrea and Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau focusing on operating systems, distributed systems, and storage systems.

news
  • USENIX Test of Time award for "A Five-Year Study of File-System Metadata", published in FAST '07.
  • Invited talk at UIUC, April 2021 (Host: Jian Huang).
  • Delivered the keynote at PDSW '20, Nov 2020.
  • Invited talk at U. Toronto, Dec 2018 (Host: Ashvin Goel).
  • SummaryStore open sourced; source code available here under Apache 2.0 License.
  • Position paper on geo-distributed storage for continuous learning at NIPS '18 workshop on Systems for ML.
  • Invited talk at Mobisys IoT day, June 2018 (schedule).
  • Invited talk at ETH Zurich, June 2018 (Host: Onur Mutlu).
  • Invited talk at IIT Delhi, Nov 2017 (Host: Sorav Bansal).
  • SummaryStore to appear at SOSP '17 [PDF].
  • Position paper on the role of approximate storage systems in machine learning to appear at AISys, co-located with SOSP '17.
  • Rivulet to appear at Middleware '17.
  • PC Chair for FAST '18; the call for papers is out with Sep 28 as submission deadline.
  • Sam Noh and I are co-chairing HotStorage '16; do consider submitting in early March (CFP)
  • Simba practitioner talk at USENIX ATC '15 in July
  • Invited talk at INRIA on "Building Data-Centric Apps for Mobile Devices", April 2015
  • Simba source code now on Github [src]
  • Simba cloud paper to appear at Eurosys '15 [PDF]
  • Simba mobile client paper to appear at FAST '15 [PDF]
  • Invited talk at USC on "Rethinking Data Abstractions for Mobile Apps", April 2014 (Host: Ramesh Govindan)
  • Invited talk at SNIA SDC 2012 on "Revisiting Storage for Smartphones"
  • Guest Lecture at CMU on "Storage Systems for Mobile Devices" (Slides) (Host: Greg Ganger)
  • FAST 2012 paper gets Best Paper award. Look at: MIT Tech Review, Slashdot, or simply read the paper.
  • FAST 2011 paper gets Best Paper award
  • KVZone released; NEC Labs benchmarking tool for key-value store evaluation
  • FAST 2009 paper gets Best Paper award

  • selected publications [full list] [Google Scholar]
    Low-Latency Analytics on Colossal Data Streams with SummaryStore SOSP '17

    Tunable End-to-End Data Consistency for Mobile Apps
    Eurosys '15

    Reliable, Consistent, and Efficient Data Sync for Mobile Apps
    FAST '15

    Revisiting Storage for Smartphones
    FAST '12, TOS '12
    Best Paper
    Emulating Goliath Storage Systems with David FAST '11, TOS '12 Best Paper
    Generating FS Images with Impressions
    FAST '09, TOS '09 Best Paper
    Design Tradeoffs for SSD Performance USENIX '08
    Five-Year Study of FS Metadata FAST '07, TOS '07 Award Paper
    IRON File Systems
    SOSP '05

    Deconstructing Storage Clusters
    ISCA '05


    community
  • USENIX FAST Conference (Steering Committee)
  • USENIX HotStorage Workshop (Steering Committee)
  • USENIX OpML Conference (Steering Committee)
  • ACM Transactions on Storage (Associate Editor)
  • Check out the SOSP '13 BoF on NSF PRObE (organized by Garth Gibson) 
  • Invited panelist for Department of Energy's SBIR funding program 2011
  • Recent Program Committees
  •     2024: OSDI, ASPLOS
        2023: SOSP, OSDI, FAST
        2022: OSDI
        2021: FAST, Usenix ATC
        2020: FAST, Usenix ATC, SYSTOR
        2019: SOSP, FAST, Usenix ATC
        2018: FAST PC Chair (CFP), HotCloud, Sigcomm IoT S&P, ApSys
        2017: FAST, CCS IoT S&P
        2016: OSDI, HotStorage PC Chair (CFP)
        2015: SOSP Scholarships Chair (CFP), FAST, MDM, NAS, TRIOS, INFLOW
        2014: SOCC, INFLOW, Cluster, HotStorage, NVMW, MDM (ACM TOS)
        2013: FAST, FAST '13 Posters Chair, NVMW (ACM TOCS, ISCA, ACM TOS)
    play
       Deviate a bit or see these.