I am working at Meta (Facebook).

I obtained my PhD degree in Computer Science from The University of Hong Kong in 2015, supervised by Prof. Francis C.M. Lau, and my Bachelor's degree from Harbin Institute of Technology in 2009 (rank 1st out of 186). I was an intern at Microsoft Research Asia (2014) and VMware (2010).

Conferences Papers

1. [ICDE 2020] Yuan Mei, Luwei Cheng, Vanish Talwar, Michael Y. Levin, Gabriela Jacques-Silva, Nikhil Simha,  Anirban Banerjee, Brian Smith, Tim Williamson, Serhat Yilmaz, Weitao Chen, Guoqiang Jerry Chen. "Turbine: Facebook's Service Management Platform for Stream Processing", in International Conference on Data Engineering (Industrial Track), April 20-24, 2020, Dallas, Texas, USA. https://engineering.fb.com/data-infrastructure/turbine/

2. [VLDB 2018] Gabriela Jacques-Silva, Ran Lei, Luwei Cheng, Guoqiang Jerry Chen, Kuen Ching, Tanji Hu, Yuan Mei, Kevin Wilfong, Rithin Shetty, Serhat Yilmaz, Anirban Banerjee, Benjamin Heintz, Shridar Iyer, Anshul Jaiswal, "Providing Streaming Joins as a Service at Facebook", in International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (Industrial Track), August 27–31, 2018, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

3. [USENIX ATC 2018] Weiwei Jia, Cheng Wang, Xusheng Chen, Jianchen Shan, Heming Cui, Xiaoning Ding, Luwei Cheng, Francis C. M. Lau, Yuexuan Wang, "Effectively Mitigating I/O Inactivity in vCPU Scheduling", in USENIX Annual Technical Conference, July 11–13, 2018, in Boston, MA, USA.

4. [Middleware 2017] Yong Zhao, Kun Suo, Luwei Cheng, and Jia Rao, "Scheduler Activations for Interference-Resilient SMP Virtual Machine Scheduling", in ACM/IFIP/USENIX Middleware, December 11-15, 2017 Las Vegas, Nevada, USA.

5. [SoCC 2017] Kun Suo, Yong Zhao, Jia Rao, Luwei Cheng, Xiaobo Zhou, and Francis C.M. Lau, "Preserving I/O Prioritization in Virtualized OSes", in ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing, September 25-27, 2017 Santa Clara, California, USA.

6. [APSys 2016] Kun Suo, Jia Rao, Luwei Cheng, and Francis C.M. Lau, "Time Capsule: Tracing Packet Latency across Different Layers in Virtualized Systems", in ACM SIGOPS Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems, Pages 3:1-3:9, August 4-5, 2016, Hong Kong, China. Best Paper Award.

7. [EuroSys 2016] Luwei Cheng, Jia Rao, and Francis C.M. Lau, "vScale: Automatic and Efficient Processor Scaling for SMP Virtual Machines", in European Conference on Computer Systems, Pages 2:1-2:14, April 19-21, 2016, London, United Kingdom.

8. [ICNP 2013] Luwei Cheng, Cho-Li Wang, and Francis C.M. Lau, "PVTCP: Towards Practical and Effective Congestion Control in Virtualized Datacenters", in IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols, Pages 1-10, October 7-10, 2013, Göttingen, Germany.

9. [ICNP 2013] Luwei Cheng, "Rethinking congestion control in virtualized datacenters", in IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols, PhD Forum, October 7-10, 2013, Göttingen, Germany.

10. [SoCC 2012] Luwei Cheng and Cho-Li Wang, "vBalance: Using Interrupt Load Balance to Improve I/O Performance for SMP Virtual Machines", in ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing, Pages 2:1-2:14, October 14-17, 2012, San Jose, California, USA.

11. [UCC 2011] Luwei Cheng, Cho-Li Wang, and Sheng Di, "Defeating Network Jitter for Virtual Machines", in IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing, Pages 65-72, December 5-7, 2011, Melbourne, Australia. Best Student Paper Award.

12. [CSC 2011] Sheng Di, Cho-Li Wang, Luwei Cheng, and Ling Chen, "Social-optimized Win-win Resource Allocation for Self-organizing Cloud", in International Conference on Cloud and Service Computing, Pages 251-258, December 12-14, 2011, Hong Kong, China.

13. [ICPP 2011] Zheming Xu, Sheng Di, Weida Zhang, Luwei Cheng, and Cho-Li Wang, "WAVNet: Wide-Area Network Virtualization Technique for Virtual Private Cloud", in International Conference on Parallel Processing, Pages 285-294, September 13-16, 2011, Taipei, Taiwan. Best Paper Nomination.

14. [ICPP 2011] Sheng Di, Cho-Li Wang, Weida Zhang, and Luwei Cheng, "Probabilistic Best-fit Multi-dimensional Range Query in Self-Organizing Cloud", in International Conference on Parallel Processing, Pages 763-772, September 13-16, 2011, Taipei, Taiwan.

Journal Papers

1. [TPDS 2017] Mingzhe Zhang, Haibo Chen, Luwei Cheng, Francis C.M. Lau, and Cho-Li Wang, "Scalable Adaptive NUMA-aware Lock", in IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, Volume 28, Issue 6, Pages 1754-1769, June 2017.

2. [TPDS 2016] Luwei Cheng and Francis C.M. Lau, "Offloading Interrupt Load Balancing from SMP Virtual Machines to the Hypervisor", in IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, Volume 27, Issue 11, Pages 3298-3310, Nov. 2016.

3. [ToN 2016] Luwei Cheng and Francis C.M. Lau, "Revisiting TCP Congestion Control in A Virtual Cluster Environment", in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Volume 24, Issue 4, Pages 2154-2167, Aug. 2016.

4. [FGCS 2013] Luwei Cheng and Cho-Li Wang, "Network Performance Isolation for Latency-Sensitive Cloud Applications", in Future Generation Computer Systems, Volume 29, Issue 4, Pages 1073-1084, June 2013.

Posters

1. [USENIX ATC 2016] Kun Suo, Jia Rao, Luwei Cheng, Xiaobo Zhou, and Francis C.M. Lau, "xBalloon: Bridging the Gap between Physical and Virtual Environments in I/O Prioritization", in USENIX Annual Technical Conference, July 12-14, 2017, Santa Clara, CA, USA.

2. [PPoPP 2016] Mingzhe Zhang, Haibo Chen, Luwei Cheng, Francis C. M. Lau, and Cho-Li Wang, "Scalable Adaptive NUMA-aware Lock: Combining Local Locking and Remote Locking for Efficient Concurrency", in ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming, March 12-16, 2016, Barcelona, Spain.

Talks

1. [XPDS 2013] Luwei Cheng and Francis C.M. Lau, "On ParaVirtualizing TCP: Congestion Control in Xen Virtual Machines", in Xen Project Developer Summit, October 24-25, Edinburgh, United Kingdom.  [Video] [Slides] [Highlight-I][Highlight-II].

   • A photo with Linus Towards! :)

Honors & Awards

• 2016: Best Paper Award, APSys 2016.

• 2014: Excellence Award of Stars-of-Tomorrow Internship Program, Microsoft Research Asia.

• 2014: Amazon Web Service Education Research Grant Award.

• 2014: Hung Hing Ying Scholarship Award, The University of Hong Kong.

• 2013: Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship (10 awardees in the Asia-Pacific region).

• 2013: Invited Speaker in Xen Developer Summit.

• 2012: Hong Kong PhD Fellowship (3.8% out of all disciplines in HK).

• 2011: Best Student Paper Award, in IEEE/ACM UCC (out of 127 submissions).

• 2011: Best Paper Nomination, ICPP 2011.

• 2011: Best Tutor Award, Department of Computer Science, the University of Hong Kong.

• 2009: Rank 1st out of 186 in UG period (School of Computer Science, Harbin Institute of Technology).

  • Awards obtained in UG period are omitted.

Academic Services

• Technical Program Committee Member:

  • 2017: IEEE International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems (ICPADS)

  • 2017: European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys), Shadow.

  • 2016: IEEE International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems (ICPADS)

  • 2013: Scalable Cloud Data Management (SCDM) Workshop, DOA-Trusted Cloud.

• Journal Reviewer:

  • IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS)

  • IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing (TCC)

  • Elsevier Future Generation Computer Systems (FGCS)

  • Journal of Interconnection Networks (JOIN)

• Conference Reviewer:

  • 2016: INFOCOM; 2015: ICPP; 2014: ICNP, ICPP, IWQoS; 2013: IPDPS; 2012: UCC, IEEE Cluster, HHME; 2011: IPDPS; 2010: CCGrid, HPCS

Work Experience

• [2015.12 - present] Research Scientist, Facebook

  • Realtime Stream Processing (Puma, Stylus)

  • Realtime Message Bus (Scribe)

• [2014.06 - 2014.09] Research Intern, Microsoft Research Asia (datacenter networking team)

  • Project #1: Congestion Control in "RDMA Over Datacenter Ethernet"

  • Project #2: High-Performance Host Networking in Multi-Tenant Cloud Datacenters

  • Project #3: Ultra-Low Latency Flow Scheduling in Virtualized Datacenters

  • Mentors: Yongqiang Xiong, Kun Tan and Layong Luo

• [2010.07 - 2010.09] Software Engineer Intern, VMware (vmkernel networking team)

  • Project: Improve the Scalability of VMware's Distributed Virtual Switch (DVS)

  • Mentors: Jason Jingchun Jiang, Donghai Han and Wei Zhang

Having Fun in Open Source Communities

• Bug report [May-29-2015]: Security issue in Xen libxl toolstack.

  • Description: the buggy implementation of 'xl vcpu-set' makes the driver domain vulnerable to denial-of-service attack from malicious guests.

  • This problem has been there since libxl was introduced in Xen 4.1.

  • It was fixed in versions latter than Xen 4.5.0.

• Bug report [Mar-19-2014]: Incorrect time accounting in Linux's process scheduler for KVM/Xen guest.

  • Description: Linux CFS completely relies on 'rq->clock_task' to schedule tasks. In consolidated environments, timekeeping problem makes the guest unable to correctly update 'rq->clock_task'. When both IRQ_time_account and PV_time_account come into play, 'rq->clock_task' just *stalls*, which is a disaster to CFS.

  • This bug exists in Linux 3.1.x - latest (Linux 3.13.x), confirmed by Glauber Costa.

  • A simple solution: disable CONFIG_IRQ_TIME_ACCOUNTING in the VM kernel.

• Bug report [Sep-02-2013]: Serious unfairness in Xen's virtual machine scheduler.

  • Description: when changing Xen's scheduling timeslice on-the-fly, the buggy implementation of 'cap' mechanism brings seriously unfair credit allocation to VMs.

  • This bug exists in Xen 4.2.x and 4.3.x, confirmed by George Dunlap.

  • It was fixed in Xen 4.4.

• Bug report [Mar-13-2012]: Semantic error in Apache Olio Benchmark (a Web 2.0 toolkit) .

  • Description: this bug makes the webserver unable to connect to the backend database, making many test cases fail.

Projects Involved

• 2009.09 - 2011.06, Build HKU Gideon-II Cluster.

  • It was the most powerful cluster in Hong Kong.

• 2008.09 - 2009.07, Design and Implementation of OSEK/VDX Operating System (Undergraduate FYP).

  • The source code is available upon request.

Teaching Assistant

• 2014.01 - 2014.05, COMP3234 - Computer and Communication Networks (Undergraduate Course).

• 2013.01 - 2013.05, COMP8301 - Advanced Topics in Computer Systems (Research-oriented Course).

• 2011.01 - 2011.05, CSIS7305 - Cluster, Grid and Cloud Computing (M.Sc. Course). Best Tutor Award.

• 2009.09 - 2009.12, CSIS0230A - Principles of Operating Systems (Undergraduate Course).

Misc

• Randy's Lecture: http://www.cmu.edu/randyslecture/