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I am a PhD student in Cornell CIS where I am incredibly fortunate to be advised by Prof. Rachit Agarwal. My research interests are broadly in computer systems. Traditionally, a distributed system is modeled as a collection of independent hosts interconnected by a network. Motivated by the rapid evolution of modern host hardware, my thesis explores a model in which each host itself is viewed as a distributed system. Inspired by this lens, my work revisits classical assumptions in operating systems and distributed systems.

I have also been fortunate to have industry experience through current and past positions at Google Systems Research Group, Azure Research - Systems, Samsung Memory Solutions Lab and Microsoft Research India.

I am on the academic job market 2025-2026!

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Selected Publications

• Tiered Memory Management: Access Latency is the Key! [PDF] [Slides] [Code]
  Midhul Vuppalapati, Rachit Agarwal
  ACM SOSP 2024
  


• Understanding the Host Network [PDF] [Slides] [Code]
  Midhul Vuppalapati, Saksham Agarwal, Henry N. Schuh, Baris Kasikci, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Rachit Agarwal
  ACM SIGCOMM 2024
  Best Student Paper Award, SIGMETRICS Best-of-the-rest
  


• Karma: Resource Allocation for Dynamic Demands [PDF] [Slides] [Talk] [Code]
  Midhul Vuppalapati, Giannis Fikioris, Rachit Agarwal, Asaf Cidon, Anurag Khandelwal, Éva Tardos
  USENIX OSDI 2023


• Shortstack: Distributed, Fault-tolerant, Oblivious Data Access [PDF] [Slides] [Code]
  Midhul Vuppalapati*, Kushal Babel*, Anurag Khandelwal, Rachit Agarwal
  USENIX OSDI 2022


• Rearchitecting Linux Storage Stack for μs latency and High Throughput [PDF] [Code]
  Jaehyun Hwang, Midhul Vuppalapati, Simon Peter, Rachit Agarwal
  USENIX OSDI 2021


• Building an Elastic Query Engine on Disaggregated Storage [PDF] [Slides] [Talk] [Code]
  Midhul Vuppalapati, Justin Miron, Rachit Agarwal, Dan Truong, Ashish Motivala, Thierry Cruanes
  USENIX NSDI 2020
  Covered in the Morning Paper


• INSTalytics: Cluster Filesystem Co-design for Big-data Analytics [PDF] [Slides] [Talk]
  Muthian Sivathanu, Midhul Vuppalapati, Bhargav Gulavani, Kaushik Rajan, Jyoti Leeka, Jayashree Mohan, Piyus Kedia
  USENIX FAST 2019
  Fast tracked to ACM Transactions on Storage 2020

(* equal contribution)

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Contact

Please feel free to contact me via email or step-by my office if you're at Cornell.

Email

midhul [at] cs [dot] cornell [dot] edu

Address

440, Bill and Melinda Gates Hall,
107 Hoy Rd,
Ithaca, NY 14853

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Misc

I like to juggle. As of 2025, I can juggle 5 balls, flash 7 balls, and juggle 3 clubs (which may or may not be on fire). Additionally, I enjoy passing clubs and occasionally performing with the awesome folks at the Cornell Juggling Club. I also love speeding around Ithaca on my Kepler (e-bike).