SCS Alumnus Receives ACM SIGOPS Dissertation Award
Marylee WilliamsMonday, November 3, 2025Print this page.
Juncheng Yang, a recent Carnegie Mellon University Ph.D. graduate, received the 2025 ACM SIGOPS Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award, which recognizes the contributions and impact a doctoral thesis has on software systems research.
Established by the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group in Operating Systems (ACM SIGOPS), the dissertation award is presented annually at the ACM SIGOPS conference.
Yang's dissertation, "Designing Efficient and Scalable Key-Value Cache Management Systems," uncovered insights into caching, leading to three advancements in this area. He developed Segcache, a way to store data that improves efficiency by significantly reducing resource usage for workloads. Along with that, he created two eviction algorithms that decide what data needs to be evicted when the cache is full. The tech industry is already adopting these algorithms, and they've been widely implemented in open-source systems.
Rashmi Vinayak, an associate professor in the Computer Science Department, advised Yang during his time in the School of Computer Science. Yang is now an assistant professor at Harvard University's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Yang said his thesis has led to more open questions in designing new algorithms and systems.
"We find that there has been a lack of a standard benchmark in the community and we are currently working to bridge the gap, enabling fair evaluation and reproducible research," he said.
For more information, visit the ACM SIGOPS website.
Aaron Aupperlee | 412-268-9068 | aaupperlee@cmu.edu