I am currently visiting Sky Lab at UC Berkeley, hosted by Ion Stoica. I am a fifth-year Computer Science PhD Student at Harvard University SEAS, co-advised by Professor Minlan Yu and Aditya Akella. Before Harvard, I obtained my master’s degree at Tsinghua University IIIS, advised by Professor Wenfei Wu. I am interested in Machine Learning Systems, Network Systems and Programmable Hardware.

I am a recipient of the Google PhD Fellowship (2025). 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.

I grew up in Macau!

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, OSDI 2026. [arXiv]

• An Extensible Software Transport Layer for GPU Networking Yang Zhou, Zhongjie Chen, Ziming Mao, ChonLam Lao, Shuo Yang, Pravein Govindan Kannan, Jiaqi Gao, Yilong Zhao, Yongji Wu, Kaichao You, Fengyuan Ren, Zhiying Xu, Costin Raiciu, Ion Stoica. OSDI 2026. [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]

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

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]

• Astral: 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