Le Xu

About

I'm a Postdoc Researcher of Computer Science at UT Austin, working with Prof. Aditya Akella at UT Networked Systems group (UTNS). I am one of the recipients of CIFellow 2021, supported by both National Science Foundation (NSF) and Computing Research Association (CRA). During my PhD I worked on making real time data processing systems more elastic, under the supervision of Prof. Indranil Gupta at Distributed Protocols Research Group (DPRG). My current research mainly revolves around all aspects of resource-efficient cloud computing frameworks, including serverless computing and alternative system architectures. See my CV and list of publications here.

Don't hesitate to contact me if you're interested in my experience or would like to chat about my recent research! I'm always open to opportunities for collboration and/or full-time research positions.

Education

University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

Urbana, IL

Ph.D. in Computer Science

Advised by Indranil Gupta.

2015 - 2021

University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

Urbana, IL

M.S. in Computer Science

Advised by Indranil Gupta.

2013 - 2015

University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

Urbana, IL

B.S. in Math and Computer Science

2009 - 2013

Projects and Preprints

Preprint

Bodun Hu, Le Xu, Jeongyoon Moon, Neeraja J. Yadwadkar, Aditya Akella. "MOSEL: Inference Serving Using Dynamic Modality Selection."[arxiv]

A modality-selection framework for real-time ML inference.

2023/10

Preprint

Le Xu, Divyanshu Saxena, Neeraja J. Yadwadkar, Aditya Akella and Indranil Gupta. "Dirigo: Self-scaling Stateful Actors For Serverless Real-time Data Processing."[arxiv]

A virtual actor model that helps stream processing applications to scale freely at fine granularity.

2023/08

Publications

IROS 23

Peter Schafhalter, Sukrit Kalra, Le Xu, Joseph E. Gonzalez, and Ion Stoica. "Leveraging Cloud Computing to Make Autonomous Vehicles Safer."[pdf][arxiv]

A systematic approach that improves driving safety for autonomous vehicles with the unreliable resource pool of the cloud.

2023/10

VLDB 22

Li Su, Xiaoming Qin, Zichao Zhang, Rui Yang, Le Xu, Indranil Gupta, Wenyuan Yu, Kai Zeng and Jingren Zhou. "Banyan: A Scoped Dataflow Engine for Graph Query Service."[arxiv][pdf]

A scoped dataflow model for graph traversal queries that explicitly exposes concurrent execution and control of any subquery to the finest granularity.

2022/09

PhD Dissertation

Le Xu "Elastic techniques to handle dynamism in real-time data processing systems."[pdf]

2021/12

NSDI 21

Le Xu, Shivaram Venkataraman, Indranil Gupta, Luo Mai, and Rahul Potharaju. "Move Fast and Meet Deadlines: Fine-grained Real-time Stream Processing with Cameo."[pdf][arxiv][pptx][video]

A performance target-aware scheduling frameowrk that supports fine-grained operator scheduling, built for actor-based, distributed dataflow runtime.

2021/04

CODASPY 20

Long, Yunhui, Le Xu and Carl A. Gunter. "A Hypothesis Testing Approach to Sharing Logs with Confidence." [pdf]

An end-to-end framework that allows users to identify risks of information leakage in logs, and to release the logs with a much lower risk of exposing the sensitive attribute through log obfuscation.

2020/03

SoCC 18

Kalim, Faria, Le Xu, Sharanya Bathey, Richa Meherwal, and Indranil Gupta. "Henge: Intent-driven Multi-Tenant Stream Processing" [pdf] [pptx] [arxiv]

An intent-driven mechanism to unify user-defined performance objectives and improve cluster-wise overall satisfaction in multi-tenant stream processing system.

2018/10

VLDB 18

Luo Mai, Kai Zeng, Rahul Potharaju, Le Xu, Steve Suh, Shivaram Venkataraman, Paolo Costa, Terry Kim, Saravanan Muthukrishnan, Vamsi Kuppa, Sudheer Dhulipalla, and Sriram Rao. "Chi: a scalable and programmable control plane for distributed stream processing systems." [pdf][pptx]

A generalized control plane and control message design for stream processing systems that allows a wide range of functionalities being implemented and efficiently executed.

2018/06

EuroSys 18

Mainak Ghosh, Ashwini Raina, Le Xu, Xiaoyao Qian, Indranil Gupta, and Himanshu Gupta. "Popular is Cheaper: Curtailing Memory Costs in Interactive Analytics Engines." [pdf][pptx][report]

Replication and routing strategy designed for popularity-driven workloads for interactive analytics engines.

2018/04

SoCC 2017

Mijung Kim, Jun Li, Haris Volos, Manish Marwah, Alexander Ulanov, Kimberly Keeton, Joseph Tucek, Lucy Cherkasova, Le Xu, and Pradeep Fernando. "Sparkle: Optimizing spark for large memory machines and analytics" [arxiv]

A shared-memory shuffle engine and off-heap memory store that optimize Spark in the scale-up setting.

2017/08

IC2E 2016

Le Xu, Boyang Peng, and Indranil Gupta. "Stela: Enabling stream processing systems to scale-in and scale-out on-demand." [pdf] [pptx][video]

Exploring topology-aware algorithms for migrating real time tasks to optimize distributed stream processing system throughput during cluster configuration changes.My M.S. thesis was also based on this project.

2016/04

Master Thesis

Le Xu "Stela: on-demand elasticity in distributed data stream processing systems."[pdf]

2015/05

IWCA 2015

Wenting Wang, Le Xu, and Indranil Gupta. "Scale Up vs. Scale Out in Cloud Storage and Graph Processing Systems."[pdf] [pptx]

Constructing cluster's linear pricing model for both scale up and scale out cluster based on pricing scheme provided by major cloud providers.

2015/05

Industrial Experiences

Alibaba Damo Academy (Data Analytics and Intelligence Lab)

Research Intern

Building hierarchical actor-based framework for distributed graph querying service.

June 2019 - Aug 2019

Microsoft (Cloud and Information Services Lab)

Research Intern

Building a control layer inside of a real-time stream processing engine for flexible and efficient online monitoring and re-configuration

May 2017 - Aug 2017

Hewlett-Parkard Labs (Software Analytics Group)

Research Intern

Conducting Spark performance analysis for micro-benchmark and machine learning applications

May 2016 - Aug 2016

Service

  • 05/2023: Program Committee: 2024 USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 24')
  • 02/2023: Program Committee: 2023 ACM/IFIP/USENIX International Middleware Conference (Middleware 23')

Teaching

  • 05/2018, 05/2020: Teaching Assistant: Cloud Computing Capstone (Coursera)
  • 01/2015, 09/2019: Teaching Assistant: Distributed System (CS 425)
  • 01/2015, 01/2016: Teaching Assistant: Cloud Computing Concepts (Coursera)
  • 01/2016: Teaching Assistant: Advanced Distributed Systems (CS 525)

Honors, Memberships, Awards

  • 2021: 2021 CRA/CCC Computing Innovation Fellows
  • 2020: Rising Stars EECS Workshop
  • 2019: SOSP 19 Travel Grant
  • 2018: OSDI 18 Travel Grant
  • 2018: SoCC 18 Travel Grant
  • 2017: SOSP 17 Travel Grant
  • 2016: David J. Kuck Outstanding M.S. Thesis Award
  • 2015: Grace Hopper Celebration Travel Fund
  • 2015: Conference Travel Grant
  • 2015: Outstanding Teaching Assistant
  • 2011: Member of PI MU EPSILON: National Math Honor Society
  • 2010: Edmund J James Scholar

Cloud-Free Zone

  • Sometimes I blah about random thoughts. ATTENTION: you are about to enter a cloud-free zone!
  • Occationally I tweet (or retweet) about things (not entirely cloud-free).

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