Ramnatthan Alagappan

Ramnatthan Alagappan is an Assistant Professor at the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, University of Illinois. His research focuses on distributed systems, storage systems, and fault tolerance in modern datacenter environments. He leads projects investigating high-performance storage abstractions, replication strategies, and reliability engineering for distributed infrastructure.

Key research areas include filesystem design, crash consistency mechanisms, and optimizing storage hierarchies for hybrid NVM environments. His work emphasizes practical implementations of theoretical models, such as the LazyLog shared log abstraction and IONIA replication framework for disk-based key-value stores.

Alagappan has received the NSF CAREER Award (2024) for his research on datacenter-aware storage systems. His recent publications address challenges in disaggregated datacenters, fault tolerance for modern workloads, and automated reliability testing for cluster management systems. He collaborates extensively on projects involving distributed storage protocols, log-based systems, and performance optimization for large-scale infrastructures.

His research spans theoretical contributions (e.g., consistency models) to applied systems work (e.g., implementing fault-tolerant storage stacks), with a focus on bridging gaps between hardware capabilities and software system design.