I am a fourth-year Computer Science PhD Student at SEAS Harvard University, co-advised by Professor Minlan Yu and Aditya Akella. Before Harvard, I obtained my master’s degree at IIIS Tsinghua University advised by Professor Wenfei Wu.

My previous research received the Best Paper Award in USENIX NSDI 2021, and the co-authored work won the Distinguished Paper Award in ASPLOS 2023.

Recently interested in Networked Systems, Machine Learning Systems, Programmable Hardware and In-Network Computation.

Publications

Reliable and Efficient ML Training and Inference Systems

• TrainMover: An Interruption-Resilient and Reliable ML Training Runtime
  ChonLam Lao, Minlan Yu, Aditya Akella, Jiamin Cao, Yu Guan, Pengcheng Zhang, Zhilong Zheng, Yichi Xu, Ennan Zhai, Dennis Cai, Jiaqi Gao. In submission. [arXiv]

• EdgeSight: Enabling Modeless and Cost-Efficient Inference at the Edge
  ChonLam Lao, Jiaqi Gao, Ganesh Ananthanarayanan, Aditya Akella, Minlan Yu. In submission. [arXiv]

• THC: Accelerating Distributed Deep Learning Using Tensor Homomorphic Compression
  Minghao Li, Ran Ben Basat, Shay Vargaftik, ChonLam Lao, Kevin Xu, Xinran Tang, Michael Mitzenmacher, Minlan Yu. NSDI 2024. [link]

In-network Computing and Programmable Switches

• ATP: In-network Aggregation for Multi-tenant Learning
  ChonLam Lao, Yanfang Le, Kshiteej Mahajan, Yixi Chen, Wenfei Wu, Aditya Akella, Michael Swift. NSDI 2021. [link]
  Best Paper Award

• A Generic Service to Provide In-network Aggregation for Key-value Streams
  Yongchao He, Wenfei Wu, Yanfang Le, Ming Liu, ChonLam Lao. ASPLOS 2023. [link]
  Distinguished Paper Award

• Efficient Data-Plane Memory Scheduling for In-Network Aggregation
  Hao Wang, Yuxuan Qin, ChonLam Lao, Yanfang Le, Wenfei Wu, Kai Chen. ICNP 2023. [link]

Datacenter Networking

• RDMA NIC Multipathing
  ChonLam Lao et al. In submission

• eTran: Extensible Kernel Transport with eBPF
  Zhongjie Chen, Qingkai Meng, ChonLam Lao, Yifan Liu, Fengyuan Ren, Minlan Yu, Yang Zhou. NSDI 2025. [link]

• StarPulse: A Datacenter Infrastructure for Large Language Model Training at Scale
  Qingkai Meng, Hao Zheng, Zhenhui Zhang, ChonLam Lao et al. SIGCOMM 2025

Services

• NSDI’22 external reviewer
• IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON) reviewer since 2021
• IEEE Transactions on Services Computing (TSC) reviewer since 2024

Links

• GitHub
• Resume