SimBioSys Lab

Department of Computer Science

Emory University

The Emory SimBioSys Lab is a partnership of computer science researchers studying Distributed Systems, Data Science, and their intersections. Our projects span smarter cache system, computational epidemiology, distributed end-to-end tracing, storage systems analysis, computer security, biologically plausible neural networks, and the theory of learning. We particularly care about projects with societal impact.

The Principal Investigators of SimBioSys are Profs. Avani Wildani and Ymir Vigfusson from the Emory CSI program, and Profs. Nosayba El-Sayed and Dorian Arnold are affiliated faculty.

News and Events

01/26/2024    Yazhuo Zhang's work on caches highlighted in the news!

01/10/2024   HackerNews, TLDR newsletter, and various other outlets are going wild over the Yazhuo Zhang's SIEVE paper, very cool!

11/03/2023    Simple and beautiful cache algorithm that's better than LRU by Yazhuo Zhang et al. will appear in NSDI 2024!

09/01/2023   Excited that Yazhuo Zhang's collaboration on S3LRU, first presented in HotOS 2023, will be presented at SOSP 2023!

06/20/2023    The LatenSeer "what-if" for latency project will appear in SOCC 2023. Congratulations!

11/01/2022    A collaboration on "EVStore: Scaling Embedding Tables for Deep Recommendation Systems" with collagues at the University of Chicago produces an ASPLOS 2023 paper. Vancouver, ahoy!

09/01/2022   Reza Karimi heads to DataDog after 5 great years at Emory. Congratulations Reza!

07/11/2022    Our paper The Benefit of Hindsight: Tracing Edge-Cases in Distributed Systems is accepted to NSDI 2023!

07/01/2022   Gary Vestal is selected to be a continuing ORISE fellow with the CDC.  Woot!

06/11/2022    Dynamic Network Anomaly Modeling of Cell-Phone Call Detail Records for Infectious Disease Surveillance receives Best Paper Award at KDD 2022 (Health Day track).

06/01/2022     Prof. Wildani and Vishwanath Seshagiri publish Identifying Mismatches Between Microservice Testbeds and Industrial Perceptions of Microservices in JSys 2022. Congrats! 

03/09/2022    The lab's patented KeyStrike technology wins Emory University’s Innovation of 2022. Congratulations to all involved!

11/08/2021    Lei Zhang defended his PhD dissertation "Measurement and Analysis Methods of Performance Problems in Distributed Systems". Congratulations Dr. Zhang! Lei next heads to Princeton University for a post-doc.

11/03/2021    Prof. El-Sayed's paper "OLTP In Real Life: A Large-scale Study of Database Behavior in Modern Online Retail" is presented at MASCOTS 2021.

09/01/2021   Gary Vestal is awarded an ORISE fellowship to work on foodborne pathogens with the CDC. Congratulations Gary!  

06/22/2021   Profs. Wildani and Vigfusson host a Tracing Jamboree! workshop for distributed end-to-end tracing researchers.

06/01/2021   Prof. Vigfusson is promoted to Associate Professor.

04/03/2021    Syndis, the penetration testing company co-founded by Prof. Vigfusson in 2013, is acquired.

02/15/2021    An extensive paper around our multiplicity-of-infection methods for malaria surveillance in high-transmissions areas in collaboration with the CDC is published in the Malaria Journal.

01/25/2021    "Cell-phone traces reveal infection-associated behavioral change" appears in the PNAS journal.

11/04/2020    Our paper "Serving DNNs like Clockwork: Performance Predictability from the Bottom Upreceives a Distinguished Artifact Award at OSDI 2020! 

08/15/2020    Reza Karimi and Prof. Ymir Vigfusson's paper "Serving DNNs like Clockwork: Performance Predictability from the Bottom Up" will appear at OSDI 2020.

06/10/2020    Congratulations to Caleb Ziems for receiving Best Paper Honorable Mention at ICWSM 2020! 

06/09/2020    Congratulations to Lei Zhang and Reza Karimi for winning the Best Student Paper Award at SIGMETRICS 2020!

05/03/2020     Pranav Bhandari and Prof. Avani Wildani have their paper exploring "Desperately Seeking ... Optimal Multi-Tier Cache Configurations" as well as a poster on "Can Microservices Drive a Renaissance in Workload-Aware Storage Management?" accepted to HotStorage 2020

05/03/2020     Lei Zhang and Prof. Ymir Vigfusson's paper on determining "When is the Cache Warm? Manufacturing a Rule of Thumb" is accepted to HotCloud 2020.

04/27/2020     Adversary.io, online cybersecurity training company co-founded by Prof. Vigfusson, is acquired by Secure Code Warrior.

04/07/2020     Si Chen, Jianqiao Liu, and Prof. Avani Wildani have their paper on Census: Counting Interleaved Workloads on Shared Storage is accepted to Mass Storage (MSST) 2020.

03/27/2020     Dr. Sergio Gramacho successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation on "Autonomic Formation of Wireless Mesh Networks", advised by Prof. Avani Wildani. Congratulations Dr. Gramacho!

03/17/2020     Caleb Ziems and Prof. Ymir Vigfusson's collaboration on cyberbullying with USC results in the paper "Aggressive, Repetitive, Intentional, Visible, and Imbalanced: Refining Representations for Cyberbullying Classification" being accepted to the 14th International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) 2020.

02/18/2020     Sergio Gramacho and Prof. Avani Wildani's research into "Autonomic Formation of Wireless Mesh Networks" receives an "Innovation of 2019" award by the Emory Office of Technology Transfer (OTT).

02/10/2020     Sergio Gramacho and Prof. Avani Wildani's paper on Autonomic Formation of Large-Scale Wireless Mesh Networks is accepted to Netsoft 2020.

02/02/2020     Our paper on Optimal Data Placement for Heterogeneous Cache, Memory, and Storage Systems is accepted to SIGMETRICS 2020. Check out Lei's presentation.

01/20/2020     Prof. Ymir Vigfusson's collaboration around detecting Influenza using cell phone metadata publishes the paper "Flying, phones and flu: Anonymized call records suggest that Keflavik International Airport introduced pandemic H1N1 into Iceland in 2009" in the Wiley Journal of Influenza and Other Respiratory Diseases.

11/17/2019     Prof. Nosayba El-Sayed's presents Spread-n-share: improving application performance and cluster throughput with resource-aware job placement at SC'19.

10/27/2019     Reza Karimi's collaboration with MPI-SWS on Clockwork: Letting the Cloud Serve DNN Inferences With Ruthless Efficiency presented at Workshop in AI Systems at SOSP '19

02/25/2019     Prof. Nosayba El-Sayed's paper on Automatic, application-aware I/O forwarding resource allocation presented at FAST'19.

02/25/2019     Prof. Ymir Vigfusson gives a tutorial at FAST'19 on "Caches in the Modern Memory Hierarchy with Persistent Memory and Flash".

02/13/2019     Dr. Hobin Yoon defended his PhD dissertation on "Cost-configurable Cloud Storage System Architecture Designs", co-advised by Prof. Ymir Vigfusson.

11/12/2018     Si Chen and Prof. Avani Wildani presented their paper, "Chasing the Signal: Statistically Separating Multi-Tenant I/O Workloads" at the NIPS 2018 Workshop on Machine Learning for Systems.

09/25/2018     Prof. Avani Wildani co-chaired MASCOTS'18 in Milwaukee,WI.

09/01/2018     Prof. Avani Wildani was awarded a URC Grant to study data management and imputation for modeling air pollution using aerosol optical depth.

03/12/2018     Prof. Ymir Vigfusson gave a tutorial at NVME'18 in UCSD.

02/14/2018     Prof. Ymir Vigfusson talked at FAST'18 Tutorial on "Caches for the Persistent Memory and Flash Era".

02/14/2018     Pranav Bhandari presented at FAST'18 on "Automated Metric Extractor for Filesystem Traces".