Sara McAllister

GHC 6002 · 5000 Forbes Ave · Pittsburgh, PA 15232
Email: sjmcalli [at] cs.cmu.edu
Curriculum Vitae

I am on the job market this year! Here are my materials: [CV] [Research Statement] [Teaching Statment] [Diversity Statement]

I am a PhD candidate in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. I'm co-advised by Greg Ganger and Nathan Beckmann I'm part of CORGi @ CMU and the Parallel Data Lab. Generally, I am interested in computer systems. My work centers on distributed, caching, and storage systems -- leveraging hardware-software co-design and grounding system design in mathematical modeling to enable more efficient and sustainable systems. I've published at OSDI and SOSP, including receiving a Best Paper Award at SOSP 2021. I am a 2021 NDSEG fellow, a 2023 EECS Rising Star, and a 2025 Siebel Scholar.

Outside my core research, I strongly support DEI efforts in computing. I co-created a course (15-996 CS-JEDI: Intro to Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Computer Science) with Bailey Flanigan and Catalina Vajiac . The course is uniquely tailored to introduce and discuss DEI topics with new PhD students and was approved as a required course in CMU's Computer Science Department PhD program. More details can be found in our SIGCSE '23 paper, which recieved a Best Paper Award.

News

2024

  • 2024-09-20: Thank you to the Siebel foundation for choosing me as a 2025 Siebel Scholar!
  • 2024-06-13: Our paper on storage emissions will appear at HotCarbon 2024! Looking forward to HotCarbon and OSDI!
  • 2024-05-03: FairyWREN will appear at OSDI 2024!
  • 2024-05-01: Deja-vu will appear at ICML 2024!
  • 2024-03-29: Harsh and I will be presenting our paper on Sustainable Sensing Pipelines at HotEthics!
  • 2023-02-08: Learn more about CS-JEDI in the CMU Link article, Creating a JEDI Mindset.
  • 2023-01-25: Talk on sustainable flash caching at UC Berkeley's SkyLab.
  • 2023-01-24: Talk on sustainable flash caching at Stanford.
  • 2023-01-11: Talk on sustainable flash caching at UC Santa Cruz.

2023

  • 2023-10-10: Thanks MIT PDOS for having me to give a talk!
  • 2023-08-28: I was named a Rising Star in EECS for 2023!
  • 2023-08-03: Glad to have a chance to meet other fellows at the NDSEG fellows conference. Thanks for the poster presentation award in CS!
  • 2023-03-20: Gave a talk on Kangaroo and ongoing work at UToronto. Thanks for having me!
  • 2023-01-10: Our CS-JEDI paper will be awarded best paper at SIGCSE 2023!!!

2022

  • 2022-10-03: Our paper on the CS-JEDI course will appear at SIGCSE 2023!
  • 2022-05-24: An extended paper on Kangaroo will appear in ACM Transactions on Stroage.
  • 2022-05-23: Started an internship at MSR working on Project Fiddle with Amar Phanishayee.
  • 2022-04-01: Received CMU's Graduate Student Service Award for creating 15-996 CS-JEDI.

2021

  • 2021-11-22: Gave a talk about Kangaroo virtually at Microsoft Research.
  • 2021-10-26: Kangaroo won a Best Paper Award at SOSP 2021!!! Check out press about the paper: [1], [2], [3].
  • 2021-08-06: Kangaroo will appear at SOSP 2021!!!
  • 2021-07-28: Gave a talk about PhD anti-bias course at University of Pittsburgh Diversity forum.
  • 2021-05-17: Started an internship at MSR working on disaggregated memory with Daniel Berger.
  • 2021-04-20: Awarded a NDSEG Fellowship!
  • 2021-03-23: Awarded a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship!
  • 2021-03-04: Gave a talk about Kangaroo at Cache@Scale.

2020

2019

  • 2019-09-01: After advisor matching, I'm now co-advised by Greg Ganger and Nathan Beckmann.
  • 2019-08-19: Starting my PhD in CS at CMU!

Publications

Symbols:   = Paper   = Code   = Video   = Slides   = Best Paper Award   (*) = Equal Contribution

FairyWREN: A Sustainable Cache for Emerging Write-Read-Erase Flash Interfaces

Sara McAllister, Yucong Wang, Benjamin Berg, Daniel S. Berger, George Amvrosiadis, Nathan Beckmann, Gregory R. Ganger

OSDI 2024

A Call for Research on Storage Emissions

Sara McAllister, Fiodar Kazhamiaka, Daniel S. Berger, Rodrigo Fonseca, Kali Frost, Aaron Ogus, Maneesh Sah, Ricardo Bianchini, George Amvrosiadis, Nathan Beckmann, Gregory R. Ganger

HotCarbon 2024

DéjàVu: KV-cache Streaming for Fast, Fault-tolerant Generative LLM Serving

Foteini Strati, Sara McAllister, Amar Phanishayee, Jakub Tarnawski, and Ana Klimovic

ICML 2024

Towards Understanding the Carbon Impact in End-to-end Sensing Pipelines

Harsh Desai*, Sara McAllister*, Nathan Beckmann, Brandon Lucia

HotEthics 2024

CS-JEDI: Required DEI Education, by CS PhD Students, for CS PhD Students

Bailey Flanigan, Ananya Joshi, Sara McAllister, and Catalina Vajiac

SIGCSE 2023

Kangaroo: Theory and Practice of Caching Billions of Tiny Objects on Flash

Sara McAllister, Benjamin Berg, Julian Tutuncu-Macias, Juncheng Yang, Sathya Gunasekar, Jimmy Lu, Daniel S. Berger, Nathan Beckmann, Gregory R. Ganger

ACM ToS 2022

Kangaroo: Caching Billions of Tiny Objects on Flash

Sara McAllister, Benjamin Berg, Julian Tutuncu-Macias, Juncheng Yang, Sathya Gunasekar, Jimmy Lu, Daniel S. Berger, Nathan Beckmann, Gregory R. Ganger

SOSP 2021

External-memory Dictionaries in the Affine and PDAM Models

Michael A Bender, Alex Conway, Martín Farach-Colton, William Jannen, Yizheng Jiao, Rob Johnson, Eric Knorr, Sara McAllister, Nirjhar Mukherjee, Prashant Pandey, Donald E Porter, Jun Yuan, Yang Zhan

ACM ToPC 2021

The CacheLib Caching Engine: Design and Experiences at Scale

Benjamin Berg, Daniel S. Berger, Sara McAllister, Isaac Grosof, Sathya Gunasekar, Jimmy Lu, Michael Uhlar, Jim Carrig, Nathan Beckmann, Mor Harchol-Balter, Gregory R. Ganger

OSDI 2020

Small Refinements to the DAM Can Have Big Consequences for Data-Structure Design

Michael A Bender, Alex Conway, Martín Farach-Colton, William Jannen, Yizheng Jiao, Rob Johnson, Eric Knorr, Sara McAllister, Nirjhar Mukherjee, Prashant Pandey, Donald E Porter, Jun Yuan, Yang Zhan

SPAA 2019

Education

Carnegie Mellon University

PhD Student
Computer Science - Systems
Masters in Computer Science Research
May 2022
August 2019 - Present

Harvey Mudd College

Bachelor of Science
Computer Science

Graduated with High Distinction, Departmental Honors in Computer Science

August 2015 - May 2019

Teaching

Carnegie Mellon University

Harvey Mudd College

  • ▪ CS131 Programming Languages (Spring 2019) - Grader and Tutor
  • ▪ CS105 Introduction to Computer Systems (Spring 2018, Fall 2019) - Grader and Tutor
  • ▪ CS70 Data Structures and Program Development (Spring 2018) - Grader and Tutor
  • ▪ CS70 Data Structures and Program Development (Fall 2017) - Grader and Tutor
  • ▪ CS60 Principles of Computer Science (Spring 2017) - Grader and Tutor
  • ▪ CS5Gr Introduction to Computer Science and Biology (Fall 2016) - Grader and Tutor

Industry Experience

Research Intern

Microsoft Research

Researching system support for generative ML models

May 2022 - August 2022

Research Intern

Microsoft Research

Researching disaggregated memory kernel optimizations

May 2021 - August 2021

Software Engineering Intern

Yelp

MySQL user and privilege management system

May 2019 - August 2019

Harvey Mudd Clinic

Pure Storage

Highly-available NFS Server on Pure Storage Flash Array

September 2018 - May 2019

Sofware Engineer Intern

Facebook

Built tool to automatically schedule dev server maintenance

May 2017 - August 2017

Awards

  • Siebel Scholar Award - 2025
  • Rising Star in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) - 2023
  • Best Presentation Award - NDSEG Fellows 2021 Conference
  • Best Paper Award - SIGCSE 2023
  • Graduate Student Service Award - CMU 2022
  • Best Paper Award - SOSP 2021
  • NDSEG Fellowship - 2021
  • NSF GRFP - 2021
  • Class of '94 Award - Harvey Mudd College 2019
  • Clinic Team Award - Harvey Mudd College 2019
  • Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Honorable Mention - Computing Research Association 2019