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
  • [3/2/2026] Xinyu Lian from SSAIL Lab won the 2026 Microsoft Research Fellowship. Congratulations, Xinyu!
  • [1/26/2026] 4 papers have been accepted at ICLR'26! Congratulations to all students and collaborators.
  • [11/24/2025] SSAIL Lab's work "VecFlow-Chamfer: A GPU-based Data Management System for High-Performance Multi-Vector Search on Superchips" has been accepted at SIGMOD'26. Congratulations, Chenghao, Ben, and Philip!
  • [11/20/2025] X-MoE just won the SC 2025 Best Student Paper Award!
  • [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


Haochen Shen

Ph.D Student


Ahan Gupta

Ph.D Student


Jiahuan Yu

Ph.D Student


Hsu-Tzu Ting

Ph.D Student


Zheng Wang

Ph.D Student


Haoyang Zhang

Ph.D Student


Chenghao Mo

Ph.D Student


Hongbo Zheng

MS Student


Kartik Ramesh

MS Student, Next: Databricks


Kaidi Fu

MS Student

Alumi


Akshat Sharma

MS Student
Next: Amazon


Xiao Wang

MS Student
Next: Microsoft


Neel Dani

MS Student
Next: Tesla


Jianping Li

MS Student
Next: Google


Yueming Yuan

MS Student
Next: RadixArk


Zelei Shao

MS Student, Next: ByteDance


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, Next: Amazon AWS)
    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, Next: CMU MS)
    Tong Wei (B.S., UIUC, Spring 2024 - Winter 2024)
    Xingru Lu (B.S., UIUC, Spring 2024 - Winter 202, Next: Columbia MS)
    Eddie Gao (B.S., UIUC, Spring 2024 - Winter 2024, Next: CMU MS)
    Wendi Wang (B.S., UIUC, Spring 2024 - Winter 2024, Next: Purdue PhD)
    Hangliang Ding (B.S., Tsinghua University, Summer 2024 - Winter 2024, Next: ByteDance)
    Hoa La (B.S., UMass, Summer 2024 - )
    Prajwal Hegde (B.S., UIUC, Fall 2024 - Spring 2025, Next: Jane Street)
    Jacob Xianyu (B.S., UIUC, Winter 2024 - September 2025, Next: WeRide)
    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