I am a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of California, San Diego and a member of Non-Volatile Systems Laboratory. My advisor is Professor Steven Swanson. I have broad interests in storage and memory from devices to systems and to cloud.

Before starting my Ph.D., I spent four years working at Alibaba Cloud (2019 - 2023) where I contributed many innovations in cloud storage from concept to completion. Most of them have been deployed and currently benefit various storage products at Alibaba Cloud. A well-known product I led is D3C Instance that is designed for big data services with large-capacity and high-performance local storage. We designed this service with high-density QLC NAND flash and a Cloud Storage Acceleration Layer (CSAL) in collaboration with Solidigm. Another significant project I made is ESSD-PLX which is the fastest cloud disk of Alibaba Cloud (with three million random IOPS and 30us end-to-end latency). To achieve the performance goal, I contributed to a distributed persistent memory cache from scratch.

I was also one of the founding members of SPDK China team at Intel where I spent two years working as an intern (2017-2019). I was fortunate to work with SPDK members on several storage projects (e.g., user-mode vhost and NVMe driver) and then applied these innovations to practical cloud system like Alibaba Cloud.

Recent Updates

• [Jun. 2024] Work with Global Open-ecoSystem Team (GOST) of Samsung Semiconductor in this summer.
• [Apr. 2024] Received student grant from EuroSys to attend the conference. Thanks EuroSys orgnization.
• [Sep. 2023] Start my Ph.D. at University of California, San Diego since this month.
• [Aug. 2023] CSAL: the Next-Gen Local Disks for the Cloud has been accepted by EuroSys'24.

Publications

• CSAL: the Next-Gen Local Disks for the Cloud
  Yanbo Zhou, Erci Xu, Li Zhang, Kapil Karkra, Mariusz Barczak, Wayne Gao, Wojciech Malikowski, Mateusz Kozlowski, Łukasz Łasek, Ruiming Lu, Feng, Yang, Lilong Huang, Xiaolu Zhang, Keqiang Niu, Jiaji Zhu, Jiesheng Wu
  The European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys), 2024.
  Two artifact badges (available and functional) received
  Source code of CSAL has been upstreamed into SPDK
  [Paper] / [Slides] / [Project]

• A Media-Aware Cloud Storage Acceleration Layer (CSAL) Cache Solution with Intel Optane SSDs for Alibaba ECS Local Disk D3C Service
  Yanbo Zhou, Li Zhang, Kapil Karkra, Wayne Gao, Chunhong Mao, Mariusz Barczak
  Intel White Paper, 2023
  [Paper]

• Spool: Reliable Virtualized NVMe Storage Pool in Public Cloud Infrastructure
  Shuai Xue, Shang Zhao, Quan Chen, Gang Deng, Zheng Liu, Jie Zhang, Zhuo Song, Tao Ma, Yong Yang, Yanbo Zhou, Keqiang Niu, Sijie Sun, Minyi Guo
  USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC), 2020.
  [Paper] / [Slides]

• Write-aware Data Allocation on Heterogeneous Memory Architecture with Minimum Cost
  Yanbo Zhou, Shouzhen Gu, Lixia Zheng, Edwin H.-M. Sha, Qingfeng Zhuge
  IEEE International Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing System and Applications (RTCSA), 2018.
  [Paper]

• Accelerating I/Os in virtual machines on physical NVMe SSDs via user space vhost target
  Ziye Yang, Changpeng Liu, Yanbo Zhou, Xiaodong Liu, Gang Cao
  IEEE International Symposium on Cloud and Services Computing (SC2), 2018.
  [Paper] / [Slides] / [Project]

Invited Talks

• Best SPDK Practices: Lessons from Five Years of Storage Evolution in Alibaba Cloud
  Yanbo Zhou
  SPDK PRC Virtual Forum, 2023.
  [Talk - Chinese]

• O+Q in the cloud: Removing QLC Write-Amplification through Intel Optane SSD with SPDK WSR
  Yanbo Zhou
  SPDK PRC Virtual Forum, 2022.
  [Talk - Chinese]

Book Chapters

• Linux Open Source Storage: from Ceph to Container (Chinese Edition)
  Publishing House of Electronics Industry, 2019.
  [Book Link]