Huaicheng Li

Huaicheng Li is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech, affiliated with the College of Engineering. He leads the MoatLab research group, focusing on operating systems, storage systems, memory systems, and systems architecture. His work emphasizes performance optimization, resource efficiency, and programmability for modern hardware.

Education: Ph.D. in Computer Science (University of Chicago, 2020), M.S. (University of Chicago, 2018), and B.S. in Computer Science and Technology (Wuhan University, China, 2013).

Research interests include:

• Co-designing software/hardware stacks for low latency and high throughput
• Offloaded/disaggregated systems for resource efficiency
• Systems support for emerging hardware like CXL

Key awards include the NSF CAREER Award (2024) and Google Research Scholar Award (2025), with publications in top conferences like ASPLOS, SOSP, and FAST. Recent work explores CXL memory pooling (Pond), tiered memory management, and SSD optimization.

Advising includes 10+ PhD/Master’s students. Teaching roles include courses like Advanced Linux Kernel Programming and Operating Systems. Research is supported by NSF, Samsung, and Google grants.

MoatLab develops open-source tools such as Pond, IODA, and LeapIO, emphasizing practical system implementation and benchmarking.