Viraj Thakkar

Graduate Research Associate,

ENGR School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence Cao Research Enterprise - JM

[email protected]

Mail code: 8809

Campus: Tempe
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Student Information

Graduate Student
Computer Science
Ira A Fulton Engineering

Curriculum Vitae

Google Scholar URL

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=0tSjYZkAAAAJ

Publications

[SeQureDB ‘26] Viraj Thakkar, Dongha Kim, Hokeun Kim, Zhichao Cao. “ANCHOR: A Vision for Secure Persistent Key-Value Stores in Disaggregated Data Centers.” 1st SeQureDB Workshop on Secure & Private Data Management, 2026. Co-located with ACM SIGMOD 2026. To Appear.
[SIGMOD '26] Qi Lin, Gangqi Huang, Te Guo, Chang Guo, Viraj Thakkar, Zhichen Zhu, Jianguo Wang, Zhichao Cao. “O3-LSM: Maximizing Disaggregated LSM Write Performance via Three-Layer Offloading.” Proceedings of ACM Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD), Research Track Full Paper, 2026. To Appear.
[HPE TechCon ‘26] John Bryne, Viraj Thakkar, Matthias Frank, Elias Klett, Harumi Kuno, Sekwon Lee, Clarete Crasta, Abhishek Dwaraki, David Emberson, Ramya Rao, Amitha C, Chinmay Ghosh, Prono Shome, Shreyas Basri. “CacheFS.” Published at HPE internal conference. 82 of 1036 (8%) Acceptance Rate. Close Access.
[SIGMOD ‘25] Viraj Thakkar, Dongha Kim, Yingchun Lai, Hoekun Kim, Zhichao Cao. “SHIELD: Encrypting Persistent Data of LSM-KVS from Monolithic to Disaggregated Storage.” Proceedings of ACM Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD), Research Track Full Paper, 2025. [PDF]
[HotStorage ‘24] Viraj Thakkar, Madhumitha Sukumar, Jiaxin Dai, Kaushiki Singh, and Zhichao Cao. 2024. “Can Modern LLMs Tune and Configure LSM-based Key-Value Stores?” In Proceedings of the 16th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems, July 08, 2024. ACM, Santa Clara CA USA, 116–123. [PDF] BEST PAPER AWARD!
[SIGMOD ’24] Qiaolin Yu, Chang Guo, Jay Zhuang, Viraj Thakkar, Jianguo Wang, Zhichao Cao. “CaaS-LSM: Compaction-as-a-Service for LSM-based Key-Value Stores in Storage Disaggregated Infrastructure.” Proceedings of ACM Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD), Research Track Full Paper, 2024. [PDF]

Research Activity

Poster and Working-in-Progress

[FAST ’26] Zhenjie Sun, Viraj Thakkar, Avani Wildani, Zhichao Cao. “Beyond ARC – Introducing LLM-driven Adaptive Policy Replacement.” 24th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, 2026.
[CUG ‘26] John Bryne, Myungjun Son, Harumi Kuno, Aditya Dhakal, Sekwon Lee, Viraj Thakkar, Clarete Crasta, David Emberson. “Characterizing sustained low-level message latency.” Conference for the Cray User Group, 2026.
[FAST ’25] Yibo Zhao, Viraj Thakkar, Zhichao Cao, Zaoxing Liu. “NetLSM: Enabling an In-Network Approach for Scheduling LSM-KVS Operations.” 23rd USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, 2025.
[FAST ’24] Madhumitha Sukumar, Jiaxin Dai, Kaushiki Singh, Vikriti Lokegaonkar, Viraj Thakkar, Zhichao Cao. “LLM-assisted Automatic-Configuration and Tuning Framework for LSM-based Key-Value Stores.” 22nd USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, 2024.

Courses

2024 Fall

Course Number	Course Title
FSE 100	Introduction to Engineering

Honors / Awards

HotStorage 2024 Best Paper Award, 2024

Grants and Awards

OpenAI Researcher Access Program Credit Award 2025
ACM SIGMOD 2025 Travel Grant (2025)
ASU SCAI, Graduate College, and GSG Travel Grant (2025)
USENIX FAST Travel Grant (2024, 2025)
ASU Fulton Fellowship (2023 - 2027)

Service

Shadow Program Committee Member, EuroSys 2025
Artifact Evaluation Committee, FAST 2025
Artifact Evaluation Committee, SIGMOD 2025

Open Source:

CGroup-Manager, A Python library to start and monitor a Linux process using groups.
Memories, A Python library for Image Segmentation
Stack Overflow, 1000+ reputation