Ion Stoica's Home Page

I am a Professor of Computer Science Division at University of California, Berkeley, and currently the Director of Sky Computing Lab. I am also a co-founder of Anyscale (2019), Databricks (2013), and Conviva Networks (2006). Here is a short bio.

Contact information:

465 Soda Hall

Computer Science Division

University of California, Berkeley

Berkeley, CA 94720-1776

phone: +1 510 643-4007

Fax: +1 510 643-1289

E-mail: istoica at berkeley.edu

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Research | Teaching | Publications | Students | Bio

Research

My area of research is at the intersection between AI and systems, cloud computing, and distributed systems. I am equally interested in designing algorithms and systems with strong theoretical foundations, and in providing practical implementations that are deployable in the real world. A list of my publications are available here.

• Some current projects include:
• Chatbot Arena, an open platform for human preference evaluations for Large Language Models (LLMs).
• vLLM, a high-throughput inference engine for LLMs.
• SkyPilot, a framework for running AI and batch workloads on different clouds.
• Ray, a low-latency distributed execution framework for AI workloads on heterogeneous clusters.
• Apache Spark, a cluster computing frameworks to efficiently support interactive, and iterative computations.
• Some previous projects:
• Alpa, an automatic model-parallel training and serving system for large-scale neural networks.
• Clipper, a low-latency, high-throughput prediction and model serving system.
• Succinct, an efficient storage system that supports sub-string queries on compressed data.
• Apache Mesos, a cluster manager that provides efficient resource isolation and sharing across cluster computing frameworks, such as Hadoop, MPI and Hypertable.
• Alluxio (formerly known as Tachyon), a an in-memory distributed storage for big data processing.
• OCALA, an overlay architecture for deploying legacy applications over new Internet architecture.
• Internet Indirection Infrastructure (i3), an network architecture that uses a rendezvous-based communication abstraction to support a wide variety of communication abstractions, including multicast, anycast and mobility.
• Chord, and efficient lookup protocol for peer-to-peer networks.
• Older projects (during my graduate studies, at CMU):
• Dynamic Packet State (DPS), a scalable QoS and resource management architecture for the Internet. The main idea of DPS is to have packets carry per-flow state, instead of maintaining the state at routers. One instantiation of DPS is CSFQ (Core-Stateless Fair Queueing), a protocol that provides fair sharing without requiring routers to maintain any per-flow state.
• Hierarchical Fair Service Curve (HFSC), an hierarchical scheduling algorithm that decouples the bandwidth and delay allocations.

Teaching

• CS 162 [10-12][17][18][21][24]
• EE 122 [01-05] [08, 09]
• CS 262a [16][18][20]
• CS 268 [01-05] [06][10]
• CS 294 [09][11][15][19] [24]
• CS 194 [05]

Students and Postdocs

Current PhD students:, Vinamra Benera, Shiyi Cao (w/ Joey Gonzalez), Audrey Cheng (w/ Natacha Crooks), Wei-Lin Chiang, Tyler Griggs (w/ Matei Zaharia), Jaewan Hong, Sukrit Kalra, Woosuk Kwon, Dacheng Li (w/ Joey Gonzalez), Shu Liu, Xiaoxuan (Lily) Liu (w/ Alvin Cheung), Michael Luo, Ziming Mao (w/ Scott Shenker), Jongseok Park (w/ Alvin Cheung), Shishir Patil (w/ Prabal Dutta and Joey Gonzalez), Peter Schafhalter (w/ Joey Gonzalez), Gur-Eyal Sela (w/ Joey Gonzalez), Samyukta Yagati (w/ Raluca Ada Popa), Yilong Zhao

Current Postdocs: Aditya Desai, Yifan Qiao (w/ Joey Gonzalez), Jiarong Xing, Yi Xu, Yang Zhou

Past PhD students:

• Romil Bhardwaj (2024, stealth startup, co-founder)
• Emma Dauterman (2024, w/ Raluca Ada Popa, Assistant Professor at Stanford University)
• Zhuohan Li (2024, OpenAI)
• Sarah Wooders (2024, w/ Joey Gonzalez, Letta, co-founder)
• Zhanghao Wu (2024, stealth startup, co-founder)
• Zongheng Yang (2024, stealth startup, co-founder)
• Lianmin Zheng (2024, w/ Joey Gonzalez, Assistant Professor at UCLA)
• Stephanie Wang (2023, Assistant Professor at University of Washington)
• Eric Liang (2020, Databricks)
• GuanhuaWang (2022, Microsoft Research)
• Wenting Zheng (2020, w/ Raluca Ada Popa, Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University)
• Ameer Haj-Ali (2020, w/ Krste Asanovic, Anyscale)
• Eric Liang (2020, Databricks)
• Anand Iyer (2019, Asistant Professor at Georgie Institute of Technology)
• Anurag Khandelwal (2019, Assistant Professor at Yale University)
• Philipp Moritz (2019, w/ Michael Jordan, Anyscale, co-founder)
• Ankur Dave (2018, Databricks)
• Qifan Pu (2018, Google)
• Haoyuan Li (2018, Alluxio, co-founder)
• Shivaram Venkataraman (2016, w/ Michael Franklin, Assistant Professor at University of Wisconsin),
• Mosharaf Chowdhury (2015, Assistant Professor at University of Michigan)
• Peter Bailis (2015, w/ Ali Ghodsi and Joe Hellerstein, Assistant Professor at Stanford University)
• Ganesh Ananthanarayanan (2014, Microsoft Research, Redmond)
• Sameer Agarwal (2014, Databricks)
• Matei Zaharia (2013, w/ Scott Shenker, Assistant Professor at Stanford University).
• Lucian Popa (2011, Databricks)
• Gautam Altekar (2011, Menlo Security, co-founder)
• Rodrigo Fonseca (2009, Assistant Professor at Brown University)
• Brighten Godfrey (2009, Associate Professor at UIUC)
• Dilip Joseph (2009, Facebook)
• Jayanth Kannan (2008, Google)
• Ryan Huebsch (2008, w/ Joe Hellerstein, Google)
• Matthew Caesar (2007, w/ Randy Katz, Associate Professor at UIUC)
• Karthik Lakshminarayanan (2007, Google)
• Ananth Rajagopala-Rao (2007, Vudu Networks)
• Boon Thau Loo (2006, w/ Joe Hellerstein, Associate Professor at University of Pennsylvania)
• Dennis Geels (2006, Google Inc.)
• Lakshminarayanan Subramanian, (2005, w/ Randy Katz and Scott Shenker, Professor at New York University)
• Shelley Zhuang (2005, w/ Randy Katz , Eleven Two Capital, co-founder)
• Sylvia Ratnasamy (2002, w/ Scott Shenker, Associate Professor at UC Berkeley)

Past postdocs:

• Daniel Kang (2022-2023, Assistant Professor at UIUC)
• Hao Zhang (2021-2023, Assistant Professor at UC San Diego)
• Kirthevasan Kandasamy (2019-2022, Assistant Professor at University of Wisconsin)
• Hong Zhuo (2018-2022, Assistant Professor at Waterloo University)
• Ionel Gog (2018-2022, Google)
• Danyang Zhuo (2019-2020, Assistant Professor at Duke University)
• Alexey Tumanov (2016-2019, Assistant Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology)
• Roy Fox (2017-2019, Assistant Professor at University of California, Irvine)
• Rashmi K. Vinayak (2015-2017, Assistant Professor at CMU)
• Xin Jin (2016-2017, Associate Professor at Peking University)
• Rachit Agarwal (2013-2016, Assistant Professor at Cornell University)
• Kai Zeng (2014-2015, Microsoft Research)
• Adam Oliner (2011-2014, Slack)
• Minlan Yu (2011-2012, Assistant Professor at Harvard University)

Past MS students: Tathagata Das (Databricks), Andrew Wang (Cloudera), Patrick Wendell (Databricks, co-founder)

PhD students on-leave: Benjamin Hindman (Mesosphere, co-founder)