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 lies at the intersection of distributed and storage systems. Her work improves system performance at scale; redesigns systems for emerging applications such as AI/ML workloads and blockchain; leverages new hardware paradigms including persistent memory, CXL, and disaggregated architectures; and strengthens fundamental system guarantees such as reliability, availability, and fault tolerance. Collectively, her research rethinks how storage and distributed systems should be designed to meet the demands of next-generation application workloads and hardware platforms.
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 SIGMOD'26
Accepted to appear in the proceedings of CIDR'26
Accepted to appear in the proceedings of HotNets'25
Accepted to appear in the proceedings of SAA'25
Accepted to appear in the proceedings of HotOS'25
Accepted to appear in the proceedings of VLDB'25
On ArXiv
Ongoing Research Projects
2025-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