Ph.D. Student · Arizona State University

Viraj Thakkar

I teach databases new tricks and poke at storage engines until they spill their secrets.

  • Key-Value Stores
  • Filesystems & Caching
  • Disaggregated Infrastructure
  • Storage for AI/ML

Hi, 👋 I’m a perpetually-curious CS Ph.D. student who gets way too excited about LSM-based key-value stores, disaggregated infrastructure, and storage systems for AI/ML. My favorite thing is taking a big, intimidating system apart just to see what makes it tick (sometimes literally), and then, on a good day, putting it back together a little bit better than I found it.

  • Best Paper Award HotStorage '24
  • 3× SIGMOD 2024 · 2025 · 2026
  • Google PhD Fellowship Nominee ASU nominee, 2026

What I Work On

the papers →

Key-Value Stores under Disaggregation

What breaks when an LSM engine's storage moves away from its compute, and can it stay fast, tunable, and encrypted once it does?

  • 3× SIGMOD
  • CaaS-LSM · SHIELD · O3-LSM
  • Encryption & offloading

Filesystems and Distributed Caches

How do you hold a globally distributed, client-side cache coherent, and what is the system underneath actually costing you?

  • CacheFS @ HPE Labs
  • FUSE · RDMA · eBPF
  • 2 patent under review

Language Models as Systems Operators

Can an LLM tune a storage engine end to end, and where exactly does that capability stop?

  • HotStorage '24 — Best Paper
  • SYSTOR '26
  • ELMo-Tune · TellyTune

Selected Publications

all publications →

TellyTune: Exploring the Limits of LLM-Driven Tuning for LSM-Based Key-Value Stores

Viraj Thakkar, Qi Lin, Kenanya Prasetyo, Raden Wisjnunandono, Jin Wang, Achmad Kistijantoro, Reza Rachmadi, Zhichao Cao

SYSTOR (19th ACM International Systems and Storage Conference) · 2026 · To appear

Conference

SHIELD: Encrypting Persistent Data of LSM-KVS from Monolithic to Disaggregated Storage

Viraj Thakkar, Dongha Kim, Yingchun Lai, Hokeun Kim, Zhichao Cao

SIGMOD (Proc. ACM Manag. Data) · 2025

ConferenceDOI

Can Modern LLMs Tune and Configure LSM-based Key-Value Stores?

Viraj Thakkar, Madhumitha Sukumar, Jiaxin Dai, Kaushiki Singh, Zhichao Cao

HotStorage '24 (16th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems) · 2024

WorkshopBest PaperDOI

Recent news

all news →

  • Our paper “TellyTune: Exploring the Limits of LLM-Driven Tuning for LSM-Based Key-Value Stores” was accepted to SYSTOR 2026! 📄

  • Honored to be ASU’s nominee for the Google PhD Fellowship Award! 🎉

  • Presented “SHIELD: Encrypting Persistent Data of LSM-KVS from Monolithic to Disaggregated Storage” at ACM SIGMOD 2025! 🔐

Explore