Sihang Liu

Sihang Liu

Assistant Professor, University of Waterloo

I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. Prior to that, I was a visiting faculty at SystemsResearch@Google. I received my PhD degree from the University of Virginia, where I was advised by Dr. Samira Khan. My PhD research was generously supported by a Google Fellowship Award.

My research interest lies broadly in computer systems and architecture.

Email: sihangliu@uwaterloo.ca

Selected Publications

* = equal contribution

Attacks on Approximate Caches in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
Desen Sun, Shuncheng Jie, and Sihang Liu
USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX SEC), 2026
[PDF]
Side-Channel Attacks on Open vSwitch
Daewoo Kim and Sihang Liu
USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX SEC), 2026
[PDF]
Cache Your Prompt When It's Green — Carbon-Aware Caching for Large Language Model Serving
Yuyang Tian, Desen Sun, Yi Ding, and Sihang Liu
ACM SIGMETRICS, 2026
[PDF][Source Code]
HybridTier: An Adaptive and Lightweight CXL-Memory Tiering System
Kevin Song, Jiacheng Yang, Zixuan Wang, Jishen Zhao, Sihang Liu, and Gennady Pekhimenko
The ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), 2025
[PDF][Source Code]
Artifact Available, Artifact Functional, and Results Reproduced
FreeRide: Harvesting Bubbles in Pipeline Parallelism
Jiashu Zhang, Zihan Pan, Molly Xu, Khuzaima Daudjee, and Sihang Liu
The ACM/IFIP International Middleware Conference (Middleware), 2025
[PDF][Slides][Source Code]
Artifact Available, Artifact Functional, and Results Reproduced
EnsembleCI: Ensemble Learning for Carbon Intensity Forecasting
Leyi Yan, Linda Wang, Sihang Liu, and Yi Ding
ACM International Conference on Future and Sustainable Energy Systems (e-Energy), 2025
[PDF][Source Code]
A Cloud-Scale Characterization of Remote Procedure Calls
Korakit Seemakhupt, Brent E. Stephens, Samira Khan, Sihang Liu, Hassan Wassel, Soheil Hassas Yeganeh, Alex C. Snoeren, Arvind Krishnamurthy, David E. Culler, and Henry M. Levy
The ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), 2023
[PDF][Slides (by Korakit Seemakhupt)]
Profiling Hyperscale Big Data Processing
Abraham Gonzalez, Aasheesh Kolli, Samira Khan, Sihang Liu, Vidushi Dadu, Sagar Karandikar, Jichuan Chang, Krste Asanovic, and Parthasarathy Ranganathan
The International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), 2023
[PDF][Source Code]
Artifact Available, Artifact Functional, and Results Reproduced
NearPM: A Near-Data Processing System for Storage-Class Applications
Yasas Senevirathne, Korakit Seemakhupt, Sihang Liu, and Samira Khan
The European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys), 2023
[PDF][Source Code (SW Part)][Source Code (HW Part)]
Artifact Available and Artifact Functional
Side-Channel Attacks on Optane Persistent Memory
Sihang Liu, Suraaj Kanniwadi, Martin Schwarzl, Andreas Kogler, Daniel Gruss, and Samira Khan
The USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX SEC), 2023
[PDF][Source Code][Slides (by Suraaj Kanniwadi)]
Artifact Available, Artifact Functional, and Results Reproduced
Carbink: Fault-Tolerant Far Memory
Yang Zhou, Hassan Wassel, Sihang Liu, Jiaqi Gao, James Mickens, Minlan Yu, Chris Kennelly, Paul Turner, David Culler, Hank Levy, and Amin Vahdat
The USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), 2022
[PDF]
PMNet: In-network Data Persistence
Korakit Seemakhupt, Sihang Liu, Yasas Senevirathne, Muhammad Shahbaz, and Samira Khan
The International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), 2021
[PDF][Slides][Video][Source Code]
PMFuzz: Test Case Generation for Persistent Memory Programs
Sihang Liu*, Suyash Mahar*, Baishakhi Ray, and Samira Khan
The ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), 2021
[PDF][Summary Slides][Source Code]
Artifact Available, Artifact Functional, and Results Reproduced
Cross-Failure Bug Detection in Persistent Memory Programs
Sihang Liu, Korakit Seemakhupt, Yizhou Wei, Thomas Wenisch, Aasheesh Kolli, and Samira Khan
The ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), 2020
[PDF][Talk][Slides][Source Code]
Artifact Available and Artifact Functional, Featured At PIRL 2020
Janus: Optimizing Memory and Storage Support for Non-Volatile Memory Systems
Sihang Liu, Korakit Seemakhupt, Gennady Pekhimenko, Aasheesh Kolli, and Samira Khan
The International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), 2019
[PDF][Lightning Talk][Slides]
2019 MICRO Top Picks — Honorable Mention
PMTest: A Fast and Flexible Testing Framework for Persistent Memory Programs
Sihang Liu, Yizhou Wei, Jishen Zhao, Aasheesh Kolli, and Samira Khan
The ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), 2019
[PDF][Lightning Talk][Slides][Source Code]
NVMW Memorable Paper Award Finalist
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