Heiner Litz

Heiner Litz is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science & Engineering Department at UC Santa Cruz's Baskin School of Engineering. He holds the Kumar Malavalli Endowed Chair of Storage Systems Research and serves as Director of the Center for Research in Storage Systems (CRSS). He is also a member of UCSC's Hardware Systems Collective (HSC). Litz earned his PhD from Mannheim University and previously held positions at MIT, Google, and Stanford University.

His research focuses on computer architecture and systems optimization, specifically improving hardware-software interfaces for data center workloads. Key areas include microarchitectural mechanisms (branch prediction, prefetching, cache design), profile-guided optimizations, and storage/disaggregated memory systems. His work bridges compiler techniques and hardware efficiency for emerging cloud applications.

Recent publications emphasize profile-guided optimization across microarchitecture layers, storage scalability, and resource allocation in distributed systems. Trends include hardware-software co-design for data centers, RDMA-based protocols, and real-time control systems.

Awards & Honors:

• Kumar Malavalli Endowed Chair of Storage Systems Research
• Best Paper Award at MICRO (2022)
• IEEE Micro Top Picks (2019, 2023)
• Best Paper Awards at ICPP (2008) and ARC (2009)

Advising & Grants: He currently advises 11 PhD students and has graduated 8 MS/PhD students. Research is supported by NSF, Intel, Samsung, Google, Meta, Nutanix, HPE, ARM, Marvell, Cerabyte, Western Digital, and Broadcom.

Labs & Teams: Directs CRSS, focusing on storage systems innovation, and collaborates with HSC on hardware-software integration projects.