A picture of Ding Yuan

Ding Yuan

Sandford Fleming 2002E
10 King's College Road
Toronto, ON M5S 3G4 Canada
yuan at eecg dot toronto dot edu

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About me

I am a professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and (by courtesy) Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto. I joined Univ. of Toronto in January 2013, after I received my Ph.D from the Computer Science Department of University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign under the supervision of a great advisor, Yuanyuan Zhou. From 2009 to 2012 I was also a visiting student in the awesome System and Networking group of University of California, San Diego. My CV is here.

I founded a startup company called YScope with my PhD students so that our research can make real-world impact. Check out CLP, an open-source tool that can compress text logs and search compressed logs without decompression. This Uber Engineering Blog describes a deployment case-study of CLP.

My research interest is systems software, with a focus on developing practical solutions to improve the availability and performance of large software systems.

I am a Canada Research Chair in Systems Software and a recipient of McCharles Prize for Early Career Research Distinction. I also received a few teaching awards, including the Gordon Slemon award and Student Choice Award (upper year instructor) of Faculty of Engineering.

I am looking for self motivated students to work with me. If you are interested, please submit your application here.

News

  • 2022/10: Yongle's PhD dissertation won The SIGOPS Dennis M. Ritchie Thesis Award. Congrats Yongle!
  • 2022/9: CLP is deployed on Uber's big data platform. In 2021, Uber's growth eclipsed the capability of their existing log management tools, forcing them to start dropping Petabytes of INFO-level Spark logs due to scalability issues (e.g., capacity, SSD burn-out). We integrated CLP into their logging library (Log4j) on Uber's big data platform, achieving a 169x compression ratio. Now, all logs are retained, and efficiently analyzed, at 169x less cost. Check out Uber's Engineering Blog for more details. (Also checkout the Hacker News discussion.)
  • 2022/9: Received Meta 2022 Systems Research Award for CLP. Thanks Meta!
  • 2022/7: HBASE-12187 and all its subtasks have been closed and implemented. HBase developers opened HBASE-12187 to address the issues we found in our OSDI'14 paper. It consists of 9 subtasks, including integrating Aspirator checks (the tool from our paper) as a check-in policy, use other static checkers including Coverity, thorough code review, etc.
  • 2022/7: Our ATC'22 paper on runtime performance is invited to publish in USENIX ;login:.
  • 2022/2: Our ctFS paper is invited to publish in USENIX ;login: and ACM TOS by FAST'22 PC.
  • 2021/8: YScope, our startup to work on our open-source log compression and search technology, is launched.
  • 2020/5: Yongle Zhang will join Purdue as an assistant professor! Congrats Yongle!!
  • 2020/5: Aspirator is now part of Google's error-prone static checker. See the pull request.
  • 2019/10: Xu Zhao will join Facebook! Congrats Xu!!
  • 2018/1: Xu Zhao won Facebook Fellowship! Congrats Xu!
  • [Publication] 2017/3: Our JVM warm-up paper appears in Usenix ;login:
  • [Impact] 2016/10: Our JVM warm-up paper is covered by The Next Platform.
  • [Impact] 2016/8: Caitie McCaffrey gave an amazing presentation on our Simple Testing paper in Papers We Love@QCon New York.
  • [Job] 2015/4: Yongle will intern in Microsoft Research Redmond this summer.
  • [Publication] 2015/2: Our OSDI paper on failure analysis appears in usenix ;login:
  • [Impact] 2014/10: HBase developers will use aspirator, a simple bug finding tool described in our OSDI paper, as their compile-time checker!
  • [Impact] 2014/10: Our OSDI paper on distributed system failures prompted many online discussions:
  • [Fun] 2014/10: Yongle and I each gave a talk in OSDI; Yongle gave a cool demo of lprof in his talk, making his advisor look bad as I did not do one in mine :)
  • [Publication] 2014/7: We have two papers accepted by OSDI'14!
  • [Job] 2014/4: Xu will go to the Bay area for a summer internship in Twitter.
  • Selected publications

    Group

    It is fun to work with the following incredible people:

    Post-doc:

    Graduate students:

    Alumni:

    Teaching

    Program committee

    Misc

    I play a lot of sports, including basketball, skiing, swimming, and running. I was the captain of the Beihang's CSE basketball team when I was an undergrad and co-captain of the UIUC CS faculty & grad-student basketball team in the intramural games. I also ran some marathon and half-marathons (see a not-so-recent photo here). When I have more time, I also play accordion and piano.

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