Soujanya Ponnapalli
Soujanya is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a systems researcher working with Prof. Natacha Crooks and Prof. Matei Zaharia at the Sky Computing Lab.
Her research is at the intersection of distributed and storage systems. She built IO-efficient infrastructures for modern applications like blockchains, key-value stores and file systems for emerging hardware like Persistent Memory and CXL, and efficient recovery mechanisms for distributed databases. Currently, she is interested in improving the fault tolerance and IO efficiency of systems that are at the heart of large-scale AI infrastructure.
She completed her PhD at UT Austin, under the guidance of Prof. Vijay Chidambaram and is a member of the Systems and Storage Lab and the Lab for Advanced Systems Research. Her doctoral dissertation focused on minimizing I/O bottlenecks in modern systems’ infrastructure for achieving high throughput and scalability.
She obtained her Bachelor’s degree with Honors in Computer Science and Engineering from the IIIT Hyderabad, where she collaborated with Prof. Suresh Purini. She was also awarded the best all-rounder gold medal for excelling in academics and for her contributions to the institute’s extracurricular activities.
Recent Publications
Accepted to appear in the proceedings of HotOS'25
Accepted to appear in the proceedings of VLDB'25
On ArXiv
Ongoing Research Projects
2024-Ongoing
2024-Ongoing
2024-Ongoing
Selected News
Rethinking Fault Tolerance: Abstractions, Guarantees, and Performance!
Awarded a fellowship to attend SuRI at EPFL
Proposal: Building Scalable and IO-efficient Authenticated Storage Systems
Vijay Chidambaram, Emmett Witchel, James Bornholt, Jonathan Goldstein, Natacha Crooks