Sara McAllister

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

I am a PhD candidate in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, supported by an NDSEG fellowship. 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 my paper, Kangaroo: Caching Billions of Tiny Objects on Flash, winning the Best Paper Award at SOSP 2021.

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

  • 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  

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

  • Rising Star in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS)
  • Best Presentation Award at NDSEG Fellows 2021 Conference
  • Best Paper Award at SIGCSE 2023
  • Graduate Student Service Award - CMU 2022
  • Best Paper Award at 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