Research areas

Research areas

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If you work in computer systems, it can be difficult to fully understand cloud computing unless you see it from the inside. The real-world requirements of global scale, extreme reliability, fault tolerance, security and privacy, plus the exponential growth of data and demand for machine learning ... that’s really unique and amazing to see close up.
Hank Levy
Distinguished Engineer
Research goals and support areas
The AI, and Systems Research team provides insights that help us assess and augment the direction of infrastructure at Google
Our researchers support Google's fundamental advances in the following technological systems. Discover our ML-Awards program for ML-driven compiler optimization, and explore the many innovative works of our researchers in the publications below
Systems Design for Future Networks

Systems Design for Future Networks

ML for Systems and Systems for ML

ML for Systems and Systems for ML

Novel Memory / Storage Systems

Novel Memory / Storage Systems

Cloud Operating Systems

Cloud Operating Systems

Data Management and Data Analytics

Data Management and Data Analytics

SoC Architectures

SoC Architectures

The 2024 ML-driven Compiler Optimization Research Award

These awards aim to fund selected research efforts to explore groundbreaking approaches in ML and datacenter workload compiler development, addressing critical challenges and unlocking new possibilities.

We're happy to announce the winners of this program. Our hope is that these awards enable the acceleration of scientific advancements in this space.

  • Each recipient receives $100,000 USD in funding and has access to a dedicated Google sponsor to provide consultation along the way.
  • Learn more about the 2024 ML-driven Compiler Optimization Research Awards here.
Research Publications
  1. VLDB 25:  Is Long Context All you Need? Leveraging LLM's Extended Context for NL2SQLYeounoh Chung, Gaurav Kakkar, Yu Gan, Brenton Milne, Fatma Özcan, Proc. of the VLDB Endowment 18(8), Sept. 2025.
  2. ISCA 25: Concorde: Fast and Accurate CPU Performance Modeling with Compositional Analytical-ML Fusion.  Arash Nasr-Esfahany, Mohammad Alizadeh, Victor Lee, Hanna Alam, Brett W. Coon, David Culler, Vidushi Dadu, Martin Dixon, Henry M. Levy, Santosh Pandey, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Amir Yazdanbakhsh. Proc. of International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), June 2025.
  3. ISCA 25: RAGO: Systematic Performance Optimization for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Serving.  W. Jiang, S. Subramanian, C. Graves, G. Alonso, A. Yazdanbakhsh, and V. Dadu. Proc. of International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), June 2025.
  4. HotOS XX: Contextual Agent Security: A Policy for Every PurposeLillian Tsai and Eugene Bagdasarian. ACM SIGOPS 20th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems. May 2025.
  5. MLSys 25: LAVA: Lifetime-Aware VM Allocation with Learned Distributions and Adaptation to Mispredictions.  J. Ling, P. Worah, Y. Wang, Y. Kong, C. Wang, C. Stein, D. Gupta, J. Behmer, L. Bush, P. Ramanaman, R. Kumar, T. Chestna, Y. Liu, Y. Zhao, K. McKinley, M. Park, M. Mass. Proc. of the 9th MLSys Conference, May 2025. (Best paper honorable mention)
  6. ICLR 25: CHASE-SQL: Multi-path Reasoning and Preference Optimized Candidate Selection in Text-to-SQL.  M. Pourreza, H. Li, R. Sun, Y. Chung, S. Talaei, G. T. Kakkar, Y. Gan, A. Saberi, F. Özcan, Sercan Arik. 13th International Conference on Learning Representations. April 2025.
  7. LLMs and Databases: A Synergistic Approach to Data UtilizationF. Özcan, Y. Cheung, Y. Chronis, Y. Gan, Y. Wang, C. Binnig, J. Wehrstein, G. T. Kakkar, and S. Abu-el-haija. IEEE Data Engineering 49(1), March 2025.
  8. CIDR 25: Towards Foundation Database ModelsJohannes Wehrstein, Carsten Binnig, Fatma Özcan, Shobha Vasudevan, Yu Gan, Yawen Wang. Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research, January 2025. (Best paper)
  9. SIGCOMM 24: A Decentralized SDN Architecture for the WANA. Krentsel, N. Saran, B. Koley, S Mandal, A.Narayanan, S. Ratnasamy, A. Al-Shabibi, A. Shaikh, R. Shakir, A. Singla, H. Weatherspoon. Proc. of ACM SIGCOMM 2024 Conference. August 24.
  10. ASPLOS 24: Sharing is leaking: blocking transient-execution attacks with core-gapped confidential VMsCharly Castes and Andrew Baumann. Proc. of the 29th ACM International Conf. on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems. April 2024 (to be presented at ASPLOS 2025).
  11. ASPLOS 24: CC-NIC: a Cache-Coherent Interface to the NICHenry Schuh, Arvind Krishnamurthy, David Culler, Henry Levy, Luigi Rizzo, Samira Khan, Brent Stephens. Proc. of the 29th ACM International Conf. on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems. April 2024.
  12. ASPLOS 24:  Limoncello: Prefetchers for Scale. Akanksha Jain, Hannah Lin, Carlos Villavieja, Baris Kasikci, Chris Kennelly, Milad Hashemi, Parthasarathy Ranganathan. Proc. of the 29th ACM International Conf. on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems. April 2024.
  13. ASPLOS 23: Towards an Adaptable Systems Architecture for Memory Tiering at Warehouse Scale, Padmapriya Duraisamy, Wei Xu, Scott Hare, Ravi Rajwar, David Culler, Zhiyi Xu, Jianing Fan, Chris Kennelly, Bill McCloskey, Danijela Mijalovic, Brian Morris, Chiranjit Mukherjee, Jiangliang Ren, Greg Thalen, Paul Turner, Carlos Villavieja, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Amin Vahdat. Proc. of the 28th ACM International Conf. on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems. March 2023.
  14. NSDI 23: Invisinets: Removing Networking from Cloud Networks.  Sarah McClure, Zeke Medley, Deepak Bansal, Karthick Jayaraman, Ashok Narayanan, Jitendra Padhye, Sylvia Ratnasamy, Anees Shaikh, RIshabh Tewari. Proc. of the 20th Usenix Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation. April 2023.
  15. ISCA 23: Profiling Hyperscale Big Data Processing, Abraham Gonzalez, Aasheesh Kolli, Samira Khan, SIhang Liu, Vidushi Dadu, Sagar Karandikar, Jichuan Chang, Krste Asanovic, Parthasarathy Ranganathan. Proc. of the 50th International Symposium on Computer Architecture. June 2023.
  16. SOSP 23: A Cloud-Scale Characterization of Remote Procedure CallsKorakit Seemakhupt, Brent Stephens, Samira Khan, Sihang Liu, Hassan Wassel, Soheil Yeganeh, Alex Snoeren, Arvind Krishnamurthy, David Culler, Henry Levy. Proc. of the 29th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles. Oct. 2023.
  17. VLDB 23: DINOMO: An Elastic, Scalable, High-Performance Key-Value Store for Disaggregated Persistent Memory. Sekwon Lee, Soujanya Ponnapalli, Sharad Singhal, Marcos Aguilera, Kimberly Keeton, Vijay Chidambaram. Proc. of the VLDB Endowment, Volume 15, Issue 13. Nov. 2023
  18. VLDB 23: WiscSort: External Sorting For Byte-Addressable Storage. Vinay Banakar, Kan Wu, Yuvraj Patel, Kimberly Keeton, Andrea C Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi H Arpaci-Dusseau. Proc. of the VLDB Endowment, Volume 16, Issue 9, 2023.
  19. VLDB Journal 23: HERMES: data placement and schema optimization for enterprise knowledge bases, Chuan Lei, Abdul Quamar, Vasilis Eftymiou, Fatma Özcan, Rana Alotaibi. VLDB Journal, Volume 32, No:3, 2023.
  20. HotNets 23: A Case Against CXL Memory PoolingPhilip Levis, Kun Lin, Amy Tai. Proc. of the 22nd ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks. Nov. 23.
  21. OSDI 22: Carbink: Fault-Tolerant Far MemoryYang Zhou, Hassan Wassel, Sihang Liu, Jiaqi Gao, James MIckens, Minlan Yu, Chris Kennelly, Paul Turner, David Culler, Henry Levy, Amin Vahdat. Proc. of the 16th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, July 2022.
  22. HotNets 22: Understanding Host Interconnect Congestion. Aksham Agarwal, Rachit Agarwal, Behnam Montazeri, Masoud Moshref, Khaled Elmeleegy, Luigi Rizzo, Marc Asher de Kruijf, Gautam Kumar, Sylvia Ratnasamy, David Culler, Amin Vahdat. Proc. of 21st Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks. November 2022.
  23. NVMW 22: SoftPM: Software Persistent MemoryYuanchao Xu, Wei Xu, Kimberly Keeton, David Culler. Proc. of the 13th Non-Volatile Memories Workshop, 2022.
  24. VLDB 22: Reflections on my data management research journey (VLDB Women in Database Research Award Talk)Fatma Özcan. Proc. of VLDB Endowment, 2022, Vol 15, No 12, 2022.
  25. HotOS 21: Cores that don’t count. Peter Hochschild, Paul Turner, Jeffrey Mogul, Rama Govindaraju, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, David Culler, Amin Vahdat. Proc. of the Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems. May 2021.