Midhul Vuppalapati

(me . DOOL as in bool, more on how to pronounce)

Assistant Professor,
Department of Computer Science, Purdue University

I am broadly interested in computer systems research. My current work rethinks the principles underlying operating systems and distributed systems in light of the rapid evolution of datacenter hardware, with the goal of enabling efficient cloud computing for the next generation of AI-driven applications.

I received my PhD from Cornell, where I was fortunate to be advised by Rachit Agarwal.

I am actively looking for highly motivated and curiosity-driven PhD students to join my group. If you are interested, please send me an email with your CV, apply to the Purdue CS PhD program by December 1, and mention my name in your application.

Selected Publications

Disaggregated Memory Management [PDF]
Midhul Vuppalapati
PhD Dissertation 2026
Tiered Memory Management: Access Latency is the Key! [PDF] [Slides] [Code]
Midhul Vuppalapati, Rachit Agarwal
ACM SOSP 2024
Understanding the Host Network [PDF] [Slides] [Code]
Midhul Vuppalapati, Saksham Agarwal, Henry N. Schuh, Baris Kasikci, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Rachit Agarwal
ACM SIGCOMM 2024
Best Student Paper Award, SIGMETRICS Best-of-the-rest
Karma: Resource Allocation for Dynamic Demands [PDF] [Slides] [Talk] [Code]
Midhul Vuppalapati, Giannis Fikioris, Rachit Agarwal, Asaf Cidon, Anurag Khandelwal, Éva Tardos
USENIX OSDI 2023
Shortstack: Distributed, Fault-tolerant, Oblivious Data Access [PDF] [Slides] [Code]
Midhul Vuppalapati*, Kushal Babel*, Anurag Khandelwal, Rachit Agarwal
USENIX OSDI 2022
Rearchitecting Linux Storage Stack for μs latency and High Throughput [PDF] [Code]
Jaehyun Hwang, Midhul Vuppalapati, Simon Peter, Rachit Agarwal
USENIX OSDI 2021
Building an Elastic Query Engine on Disaggregated Storage [PDF] [Slides] [Talk] [Code]
Midhul Vuppalapati, Justin Miron, Rachit Agarwal, Dan Truong, Ashish Motivala, Thierry Cruanes
USENIX NSDI 2020
Covered in the Morning Paper
INSTalytics: Cluster Filesystem Co-design for Big-data Analytics [PDF] [Slides] [Talk]
Muthian Sivathanu, Midhul Vuppalapati, Bhargav Gulavani, Kaushik Rajan, Jyoti Leeka, Jayashree Mohan, Piyus Kedia
USENIX FAST 2019
Fast tracked to ACM Transactions on Storage 2020

(* equal contribution)

Teaching

CS 59200: Datacenter Memory Systems Fall 2026

Contact

Email: mvuppala [at] purdue [dot] edu
(cutting-edge AI-resistant obfuscation)
Address: 2112, Hall of Data Science and AI,
475 Stadium Mall Drive,
West Lafayette, IN 47907

Misc

I like to juggle. As of 2026, I can juggle 5 balls, flash 7 balls, and juggle 3 clubs (which may be on fire). During grad school, I enjoyed passing clubs and occasionally performing with the awesome folks at the Cornell Juggling Club. I am now looking for a juggling community around the West Lafayette area---please reach out if you have pointers!

I also loved speeding around Ithaca on my e-bike, which I am yet to test out on the flat lands of the Midwest.