Lab Mission

Supercomputing System and AI Lab (SSAIL) is an active research lab at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The lab mission is (A) building next-generation AI systems for scalable and efficient intelligence; (B) enabling new system and modeling capabilities via deep innovations, advancing the state-of-the-arts; and (C) making the technology available to everyone.

  News
  • [9/4/2025] Minjia has been selected to receive the Build on Trainium Amazon Research Award.
  • [7/4/2025] SSAIL Lab's work FlexGaussian, which enables flexible and efficient compression of 3D Gaussian Splatting models, has been accepted at ACM MM 2025 (Oral). Congratulations, Boyuan, Eddie, Jacob, and Xiaotong!
  • [6/26/2025] SSAIL Lab's work X-MoE, which enables efficient and cross-platform training of emerging expert-specialized MoE models such as DeepSeek-MoE, has been accepted at SC 2025. Only 136 of 643 submissions were accepted. Congratulations, Yueming, Ahan, Jianping, Sajal, and Feiyi!
  • [6/25/2025] SSAIL Lab's work SuperOffload, which enables efficient and cost-effective training of LLMs on Superchips, has been accepted at ASPLOS 2026. Only 20 of 208 submissions were accepted. Congratulations, Xinyu, Masahiro, and Tunji!
  • [6/25/2025] SSAIL Lab's work, InstantEdit, which enables efficient text-guided image editing, has been accepted at ICCV 2025. Congratulations, Nick and Zhen!
  • [6/20/2025] Minjia has been selected to receive the inaugural 2025 Google ML and Systems Junior Faculty Award. Thank you, Google!
  • [6/9/2025] SSAIL member Xinyu Lian received USENIX ATC'25 student travel grant to present Universal Checkpointing in Boston. Congratulations, Xinyu!
  • [5/23/2025] SSAIL Lab's work VecFlow has been accepted at SIGMOD 2025! Congratulations, Jingyi, Chenghao, and Ben!
  • [5/15/2025] SSAIL Lab's work on improving KV cache efficiency and trustworthy LLM have been accepted at ACL Findings 2025! Congratulations to the MiniKV and MedCite team!
  • [5/1/2025] SSAIL member Yueming Yuan received MLSys'25 student travel grant to present the work MiLo at Santa Clara.
  • [4/25/2025] SSAIL Lab's work on universal checkpointing for large-scale reconfigurable parallelism has been accepted at USENIX ATC 2025. 100 out of 634 submissions were accepted. Congratulations, Xinyu Lian!
  • [2/11/2025] SSAIL Lab's work on compressing MoE models, including DeepSeek-MoE, has been accepted at MLSys 2025. Congratulations, Beichen, Yueming, and Zelei!
  • [2/3/2025] SSAIL member Xinyu Lian received the Amazon PhD Fellowship! Congratulations, Xinyu, and thank you, Amazon!
  • [12/31/2024] Minjia received the NSF CAREER award, which will support our work on powering the next-generation AI models!
  • [7/1/2024] Universal Checkpointing has been released in DeepSpeed! [中文] [日本語]
  • [1/16/2024] Minjia officially joined UIUC!

Xinyu Lian

Ph.D Student
Amazon PhD Fellowship
USENIX ATC'25 Travel Award


Yueming Yuan

Ph.D Student


Jiankun Wang

Ph.D Student


Haochen Shen

Ph.D Student


Ahan Gupta

Ph.D Student


Jiahuan Yu

Ph.D Student


Hongbo Zheng

MS Student


Zelei Shao

MS Student


Jianping Li

MS Student


Chenghao Mo

MS Student


Kartik Ramesh

MS Student

Alumi


Akshat Sharma

MS Student
Next: Amazon


Xiao Wang

MS Student
Next: Microsoft


Neel Dani

MS Student
Next: Tesla


Yiming Gong

Undergraduate Student
Next: CMU

Interns (over 6 months)

    Zheng Wang (M.S., Georgia Tech, Spring 2024 - Winter 2024, Next: UIUC PhD)
    Mengjue Tan (M.S., Brown University, Summer 2024 - Winter 2024)
    Yuyi Ao (B.S., UIUC, Spring 2024 - Fall 2024, Next: CMU MS)
    Banghao Chi (B.S., UIUC, Spring 2024 - Winter 2024, Next: UIUC MS)
    Beichen Huang (B.S., McMaster University, Spring 2024 - Winter 2024, Next: UIUC MS)
    Shihan Lin (B.S., UIUC, Spring 2024 - Fall 2024)
    Tong Wei (B.S., UIUC, Spring 2024 - Winter 2024)
    Xingru Lu (B.S., UIUC, Spring 2024 - Winter 2024)
    Eddie Gao (B.S., UIUC, Spring 2024 - Winter 2024, Next: CMU MS)
    Wendi Wang (B.S., UIUC, Spring 2024 - Winter 2024)
    Hoa La (B.S., UMass, Summer 2024 - )
    Prajwal Hegde (B.S., UIUC, Fall 2024 - Spring 2025)
    Jacob Xianyu (B.S., UIUC, Winter 2024 - )
    Lemin Zhang (B.S., ZJU, Fall 2024 - Winter 2024, Next: CMU MS)
    Wangjia Zhan (B.S., ZJU, Fall 2024 - Winter 2024, Next: UIUC MS)
    Chengyi Wang (B.S., UIUC, Fall 2024 - Spring 2025, Next: UIUC MS)

Past Interns and Advised Students (before joining UIUC)

    Chengming Zhang (co-advised with Leon Song), summer Ph.D. intern from Indiana University Bloomington, April--September 2023. DeepSpeed-Ulysses (PODC'24), DeepSpeed4Science (NeurIPS AI4Science Workshop 2023). Next: Assistant Professor at University of Houston
    Xinyue Ma (co-advised with Myeongjae Jeon from Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology), April 2022-June 2023. Miro (MobiCom 2023). Next: PhD at POSTECH
    Jiangfei Duan and Ziang Song (co-advised with Zhihao Jia from CMU), June 2022-December 2022. Parcae (NSDI 2024)
    Yongye Su (co-advised with Jianguo Wang from Purdue University), July 2022-September 2023, Vexless (SIGMOD 2024)
    Shuangyan Yang (co-advised with Dong Li from UC Merced), 2021 June--2023 June. Betty (ASPLOS 2023), Buffalo (HPCA 2024)
    Yucheng Lu summer Ph.D. intern from Cornell University, June 2021-Feburary 2022, 0/1 Adam (ICML 2023). Next: TogetherAI => Assistant Professor of Computer Science at NYU Shanghai
    Soobee Lee (co-advised with Myeongjae Jeon from Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology), September 2020-November 2021, CarM (DAC'2022). Next: Samsung
    Connor Holmes (co-advised with Bo Wu from Colorado School of Mines), June 2020--September 2022. NxMTransformer (NeurIPS 2021). Next: Microsoft => OpenAI
    Hongyi Wang summer Ph.D. intern from University of Wisconsin Madison, June 2020-September 2020. Next: CMU PostDoc => Assistant Professor at Rutgers University
    Zhen Peng (co-advised with Bin Ren from College of Walliam and Mary and Ruoming Jin from Kent University), Sep 2019-June 2021. iQAN (PPoPP'2023). Next: PNNL
    Jie Ren (co-advised with Dong Li from University of California at Merced), June 2019-December 2020. Sentinel (HPCA'2021), HM-ANN (NeurIPS'2020), ZeRO-Offload (USENIX ATC 2021). Next: Assistant Professor at College of William and Mary.
    Dantong Zhu visiting scholar, Janurary 2020-June 2020, Next: Uber
    Zehua Hu Microsoft intern student from Peking University, July 2019-March 2021, DUET (IPDPS'2021). Next: Microsoft
    Menghao Li Microsoft intern student from Peking University, February 2020-March 2021. AdaTune (NeurIPS'2020), DynaTune (NeurIPS'2021). Next: Microsoft
    Conglong Li (co-advised with Dave Andersen from CMU), May 2019-August 2019. Learning-to-terminate (SIGMOD'2020). Next: Microsoft=>Google DeepMind
    Stephen Zhou summer PhD intern from MIT, June 2018-August 2018. Next: Google