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


HotOS'25
Real Life is Uncertain. Consensus Should Be Too!
Accepted to appear in the proceedings of HotOS'25
VLDB'25
SkyStore: Cost-Optimized Object Storage Across Regions and Clouds
Accepted to appear in the proceedings of VLDB'25

On ArXiv


Ongoing Research Projects


Selected News


2025
2025
Summer Research Institute 2025
Awarded a fellowship to attend SuRI at EPFL
2024
Received funding from Berkeley RDI Frontier Research
Proposal: Building Scalable and IO-efficient Authenticated Storage Systems
2024
Minimizing I/O Bottlenecks to Achieve Scalable and High-Throughput Systems
Vijay Chidambaram, Emmett Witchel, James Bornholt, Jonathan Goldstein, Natacha Crooks

Organizational Roles


Program Committee
ATC'25 NSDI'25 Eurosys'25
External Program Committee
FAST'25 ATC'24 NSDI'19
Journal Reviewer
ACM TOCS'24
Academic Service
SOSP'21 Hallway Lead Eurosys'20 Shadow PC
University Leadership & Mentorship
GAAP Chair 2020-2021 GRACS Representative 2020-2021 WiCS Mentor 2019-2020

Get in Touch


Soujanya organizes the Sky Seminar Series at Berkeley for 2024-25. If you are interested in presenting your recent systems research, feel free to reach out to her!