I am a Systems Analyst Researcher at Renaissance Technologies.

I received my PhD in 2024 from the PDOS lab at MIT EECS, where my work focused on making datacenters faster and more resource-efficient. My broader research interests span operating systems, distributed systems, and hardware/software co-design.

Publications

Cloud Efficiency

1. Quicksand: Harnessing Stranded Datacenter Resources with Granular Computing
   Zhenyuan Ruan, Shihang Li, Kaiyan Fan, Marcos K. Aguilera, Adam Belay, Seo Jin Park, Malte Schwarzkopf
   22th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI ‘25)
   

2. Harvesting Idle Memory for Application-Managed Soft State with Midas
   Yifan Qiao, Zhenyuan Ruan, Haoran Ma, Adam Belay, Miryung Kim, Harry Xu
   21th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI ‘24)
   

3. Unleashing True Utility Computing with Quicksand
   Zhenyuan Ruan, Shihang Li, Kaiyan Fan, Marcos K. Aguilera, Adam Belay, Seo Jin Park, Malte Schwarzkopf
   The 19th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS ‘23)
   

4. Hermit: Low-Latency, High-Throughput, and Transparent Remote Memory via Feedback-Directed Asynchrony
   Yifan Qiao, Chenxi Wang, Zhenyuan Ruan, Adam Belay, Qingda Lu, Yiying Zhang, Miryung Kim, Guoqing Harry Xu
   20th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI ‘23)
   

5. Nu: Achieving Microsecond-Scale Resource Fungibility with Logical Processes
   Zhenyuan Ruan, Seo Jin Park, Marcos Aguilera, Adam Belay, Malte Schwarzkopf
   20th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI ‘23)
   

6. AIFM: High-Performance, Application-Integrated Far Memory
   Zhenyuan Ruan, Malte Schwarzkopf, Marcos Aguilera, Adam Belay
   The 14th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI ‘20)
   

7. Caladan: Mitigating Interference at Microsecond Timescales
   Joshua Fried, Zhenyuan Ruan, Amy Ousterhout, Adam Belay
   The 14th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI ‘20)
   

8. Semeru: A Memory-Disaggregated Managed Runtime
   Chenxi Wang, Haoran Ma, Shi Liu, Yuanqi Li, Zhenyuan Ruan, Khanh Nguyen, Michael Bond, Ravi Netravali, Miryung Kim, Guoqing Harry Xu
   The 14th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI ‘20)
   

9. ★ Doppio: I/O-Aware Performance Analysis, Modeling and Optimization for In-Memory Computing Framework
   Peipei Zhou, Zhenyuan Ruan, Zhenman Fang, Jason Cong, Megan Sh, David Roazen
   IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS’18)
   Best Paper Nominee

Programmable IO Device (SmartNIC and Smart Drive)

1. Fast and Scalable Selective Retransmission for RDMA
   Peihao Huang, Guo Chen, Xin Zhang, Can Liu, Hongyu Wang, Huijun Shen, Ying Bian, Yuanwei Lu, Zhenyuan Ruan, Bojie Li, Jiansong Zhang, Yongfeng Liu, Zhigang Chen
   2025 IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM’25)
   

2. ★ Analyzing and Modeling In-Storage Computing Applications On EISC — An FPGA-Based System-Level Emulation Platform
   Zhenyuan Ruan, Tong He, Jason Cong.
   2019 International Conference On Computer Aided Design (ICCAD’19)
   Best Paper Award

3. INSIDER: Designing In-Storage Computing System for Emerging High-Performance Drive
   Zhenyuan Ruan, Tong He, Jason Cong
   2019 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC’19)
   

4. KV-Direct: High-Performance In-Memory Key-Value Store with Programmable NIC
   Bojie Li*, Zhenyuan Ruan*, Wencong Xiao, Yuanwei Lu, Yongqiang Xiong, rew Putnam, Enhong Chen, Lintao Zhang (*:co-first authors)
   In Proceedings of the 26th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP’17)

5. Memory Efficient Loss Recovery for Hardware-based Transport in Datacenter
   Yuanwei Lu, Guo Chen, Zhenyuan Ruan, Wencong Xiao, Bojie Li, Jiansong Zhang, Yongqiang Xiong, Peng Cheng, Enhong Chen
   In Proceedings of the First Asia-Pacific Workshop on Networking (APNet’17)

FPGA

1. Hardware Acceleration of Long Read Pairwise Overlapping in Genome Sequencing: A Race Between FPGA and GPU
   Licheng Guo, Ka Cheong Jason Lau, Zhenyuan Ruan, Peng Wei, Jason Cong
   2019 IEEE International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM’19)
   

2. ST-Accel: A High-Level Programming Platform for Streaming Applications on FPGA
   Zhenyuan Ruan, Tong He, Bojie Li, Peipei Zhou, Jason Cong
   2018 IEEE International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM’18)
   

Experience

1. Software Engineering Intern. Google Mountain View, Ads Data Infrastructure Team.
   Worked on a geo-distributed low-latency streaming system.
   Jun. 2018 - Sept. 2018.
   

2. Research Intern. Microsoft Research Asia, System Group.
   Built a high-performance in-memory key-value system with programmable NIC.
   Oct. 2016 - May. 2017.
   

Service

Program committee APSys 2022
External review committee ATC 2024
Reviewer IEEE TC, IPDPS 2019, DATE 2019, FPT 2018, FPT 2018, FCCM 2018, Springer JSA, Springer FCS
Vice session chair SOSP 2021
Artifact evaluation committee USENIX Security 2024

Teaching

MIT 6.828 Operating Systems Research Seminar.
Teaching assistant and guest lecturer, Fall 2020, Fall 2022.

MIT 6.829 Computer Networks.
Guest lecturer, Fall 2023

(Last update: Sept. 18, 2024)