Ram Alagappan

Ram Alagappan is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, Department of Computer Science. He co-leads the Distributed And Storage Systems Laboratory (DASSL) and focuses on improving reliability and performance in computer systems.

• PhD from University of Wisconsin-Madison (2019)
• Postdoctoral researcher at VMware Research (2020-2022)

Research interests span storage systems, distributed systems, and operating systems, with emphasis on:

• Crash consistency and reliability
• Consensus protocols and fault tolerance
• Non-volatile memory optimization
• Datacenter storage abstractions

Recent publications highlight advancements in shared log abstractions (LazyLog, SOSP 2024), replication for KV stores (IONIA, FAST 2024), and fault tolerance in disaggregated datacenters (SplitFT, EuroSys 2024). His work also includes foundational studies on crash vulnerabilities and consistency models.

Scientific recognitions include:

• Best Paper Awards at SOSP 2024, FAST 2020, FAST 2018, FAST 2017
• NSF CAREER Award (2023)
• NetApp Faculty Fellowship (2024)

Teaching honors:

• Listed as Excellent/Outstanding Teacher at UIUC (CS598 Storage Systems, 2022-2023)
• Ranked 1st in student evaluations for CS739 Distributed Systems at UW-Madison (2020)

Grants and service:

• NSF CAREER Award, IBM-IL Discovery Grant
• Program Committee roles at OSDI, SOSP, EuroSys, HotStorage

Labs & Teams: Co-leader of DASSL research group at UIUC.