Research

My research interest lies in computer systems, especially storage systems and distributed systems. This includes consensus problems, serverless systems, blockchain technology, cloud storage infrastructures, database systems, machine learning systems, storage data structures, filesystems, etc. This field is too fantastic to miss out anything ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

My current research focuses on analyzing and improving the performance of blockchain systems, specifically on the core consensus algorithm, the data model, and the storage engine. I am currently working on Firewood to build a faster authenticated storage system. Another direction I am eager to work on is sharding with zk-proofs, which I believe has the potential to scale out blockchain systems indefinitely.

Before blockchains, my colleagues and I worked on building filesystems tailored towards persistent memories and improving stateful serverless functions through co-designing the compute and storage infrastructures.

 

Publications

• MadFS: Per-File Virtualization for Userspace Persistent Memory Filesystems. Shawn Zhong, Chenhao Ye, Guanzhou Hu, Suyan Qu, Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau, and Michael Swift. 2023. In Proceedings of the 21th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST ‘23). USENIX Association.

 

Talks

• CBox: Towards a Unified Blockchain System Evaluation Framework. Suyan Qu, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau. 2024. The Science of Blockchain Conference (SBC) Lightning Talks.
• Blockchain Technologies: An Overview. Suyan Qu. MadSystems Seminar, 20 Feb 2025.