I've realized that cat photos are more popular than posts about my research, so let's try to combine the two:

our upcoming OSDI paper, Pegasus, explained through photos of our cats

Skewed workloads are a challenge for storage systems. Some cat bowls are more popular than others.

This is often referred to as a long-tailed distribution.

(sorry, couldn't resist that one)

Provisioning for the peak workload means that some servers have to run at low utilization

If we route the cats via a programmable switch instead, using it as a directory...

...we can forward each cat to the least loaded replica...

...and achieve close-to-uniform load balancing even though the workload is f̶l̶u̶f̶f̶y̶-̶ heavy-tailed

actual paper: Pegasus: Tolerating Skewed Workloads in Distributed Storage with In-Network Coherence Directories: with @JialinLi14, Jacob Nelson, @rellismichael, and Xin Jin
http://drkp.net/papers/pegasus-osdi20.pdf

This was the last piece of Jialin's PhD, so he got a cool hat. Max wants one too.