Zhichao Cao
Assistant Professor
Assistant Professor
Zhichao Cao is a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, Arizona State University. Before that, Cao was a Research Scientist at Facebook working on storage and database related research starting in 2019. Cao obtained his bachelor's degree in Automation from Tsinghua University in 2013, and he received his doctoral degree (Ph.D.) in Computer Science at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in 2020.
His research interests include key-value store and other storage engines, intelligent storage systems, next generation data infrastructure, systems for new storage devices, and systems for big data.
[Important Notice] I'm now recruiting highly motivated graduate and undergraduate students (including 2 Ph.D. students starting from 2023 Spring or Fall). If you are interested in databases, storage systems, data infrastructure, and new data persisting techniques, please send your CV and statements to Zhichao.Cao@asu.edu.
- Ph.D. Computer Science, University of Minnesota, Twin-Cities, 2020
- M.S. Computer Science, University of Minnesota, Twin-Cities, 2019
- B.S. Automation, Tsinghua University, China 2013

Data Infrastructure: key-value store (RocksDB, LevelDB, and HBase); NoSQL database; data deduplication; backup and archive system; file system; hierarchical storage system; distributed storage system; compute-storage disaggregation
Storage for Big Data: cloud storage; object storage; storage systems for big graph; AI/ML for storage system; storage systems for AI/ML; storage system in IoT
New Storage Devices: Non-Volatile Memory (NVM); Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR); Interlaced Magnetic Recording (SMR); Zone Namespace SSD (ZNS); DNA- and Glass based storage
[TOS’21] Zhichao Cao, Huibing Dong, Yixun Wei, Shiyong Liu, and David H.C. Du. “IS-HBase: An In-Storage Computing Optimized HBase with I/O Offloading and Self-Adaptive Caching in Compute-Storage Disaggregated Infrastructure.” ACM Transaction on Storage, 2021 (to appear).
[TOS’21] Xiongzi Ge Zhichao Cao, and David H.C. Du. “HintStor: A Framework to Study I/O Hints in Heterogeneous Storage.” ACM Transaction on Storage, 2021 (to appear).
[ATC’21] Hiwot Tadese Kassa, Jason Akers, Mrinmoy Ghosh, Zhichao Cao, Vaibhav Gogte, Ronald Dreslin- ski. “Improving Performance of Flash Based Key-Value Stores Using Storage Class Memory as a Volatile Memory Extension.” 2021 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, 2021 (Acceptance rate: 64/341=23%).
[FAST’20] Zhichao Cao, Siying Dong, Sagar Vemuri, and David H.C. Du.. “Characterizing, Modeling, and Benchmarking RocksDB Key-Value Workloads at Facebooke.” 18th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, 2020 (Acceptance rate: 23/138=17% as Full Paper).
[FAST’19] Zhichao Cao, Shiyong Liu, Fenggang Wu, Guohua Wang, Bingzhe Li, and David H.C. Du. “Sliding Look-Back Window Assisted Data Chunk Rewriting for Improving Deduplication Restore Performance.” 17th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, 2019 (Acceptance rate: 26/145=18% as Full Paper).
[TOS’19] Zhichao Cao, Hao Wen, Xiongzi Ge, and David H.C. Du. “TDDFS: A Tier-aware Data Deduplication based File System.” ACM Transaction on Storage, 2019.
[FAST’18] Zhichao Cao, Hao Wen, Fenggang Wu, and David H.C. Du. “ALACC: Accelerating Restore Per- formance of Data Deduplication Systems Using Adaptive Look Ahead Window Assisted Chunk Caching.” 16th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, 2018 (Acceptance rate: 23/139=17% as Full Paper).
Courses
2022 Spring
Couse Number | Course Title |
---|---|
CSE 511 | Data Processing at Scale |
Spring 2022: CSE 520
- Proceedings Co-Chair of ACM SIGMOD 2023
- Virtual Chair of USENIX HotStorage 2022
- Program Committee of IEEE NAS 2022
- Program Committee of ACM APSys 2022
- Reviewer of IEEE Transactions on Computers (TC)
- Reviewer of IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD)
- Reviewer of International Journal of Future Generation Computer Systems
- Reviewer of Transactions on Cloud Computing
- Reviewer of Computer Communications
- Reviewer of IEEE Intelligent Systems
- Reviewer of Future Generation Computer Systems
- External Reviewer of ACM Transaction on Storage (TOS)
- Volunteer of International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP’14)
Research Scientist Facebook Oct. 2019 - Dec. 2021 Research Collaborator Facebook Sep. 2018 - Sep. 2019 Research Intern Facebook Jun. 2018 - Aug. 2018 Research Intern Veritas Jun. 2016 - Aug. 2016 Research Intern Hewlett-Packard (HPE) Jun. 2015 - Aug. 2015 Research Intern Hewlett-Packard (HPE) Jun. 2014 - Aug. 2014