Ram Alagappan

Assistant Professor @illinoiscs. PhD from @WisconsinCS. I like building and thinking about computer systems.

[Tianyin Xu @tianyin_xu]

Xudong (@xu_dong_sun) received the 2026 Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention. I wanted to write about his work, but cannot articulate better than the award committee (thank you!)

Big thanks to @AishwaryaGanlat @RamAlagappn and their students @KiranHomba73714 and @shreesha00 for taking pics and celebrating with Xudong in Prague #SOSP! Aishwarya and Ram are great mentors of Xudong throughout his PhD. Big thanks and congrats to the other members of Xudong's thesis committee, @_lalithsuresh @BrightenGodfrey Jon Howell, and Darko Marinov ! The thesis won't be possible without such an all-star team.

It take a village to raise a researcher. @UofIllinois @siebelschool is a very special one, especially for Systems Research. Congrats!

[Ram Alagappan @RamAlagappn]

Prism will be presented by our PhD student Kiran Hombal. Joint work with Jiyu Hu, Marcos K. Aguilera & @AishwaryaGanlat.

Blog post coming soon!

If you’re at SOSP, come to our talks and chat with us! (6/6)

[Ram Alagappan @RamAlagappn]

Our group is at SOSP ’26 in Prague this week! Excited to share two papers:

• AgileLog: isolated, live data streams for AI agents
• CXL-LSM / Prism: why disk-inspired indexes work well for CXL shared memory

A thread on the ideas and the people behind them (1/6):

[Ram Alagappan @RamAlagappn]

Prism keeps that mutable portion in coherent memory; the rest stays immutable, avoiding coherence overhead.

The result: up to 9x higher peak throughput than adapted state-of-the-art in-memory indexes.

Paper: https://t.co/QcouRSsNTJ

[Derek Collison @derekcollison]

Great talk! @nats_io has many of the building blocks for AgileLog with JetStream Mirrors and Sources.

https://t.co/AJY8L5x4CE

[SzymonOzog @SzymonOzog_]

Another fun thing to do is make yourself some matcha and read "Operating Systems Three Easy Pieces"