The Stanford Software Research Lunch is a weekly event on Thursday where students and researchers present their latest work to peers. Talks are open to anybody, but regular attendees are expected to give a presentation on their work.  Members of the Computer Forum are especially welcome.

Mailing list: software-research-lunch@lists.stanford.edu (subscribe via mailman)

Calendar: ical

Format: The lunch is held every week during fall, winter and spring quarter. The first week of every quarter is an organizational lunch where people can sign up to give a talk. If you'd like to give a talk, please contact Rohan Yadav.

Past quarters: Spring 2025, Winter 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Winter 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2023, Winter 2023, Fall 2022, Winter 2021, Fall 2020, Winter 2020, Fall 2019, Spring 2019, Winter 2019, Fall 2018, Spring 2018, Winter 2018, Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Winter 2017, Fall 2016.

Ordering Food: For suggestions for those ordering food for the lunch, see here.

9/11: Noisy Quantum Simulation Using Tracking, Uncomputation and Sampling

Time: Thursday, September 11, 2025, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: CoDa E401

Speaker: Siddharth Dangwal

Abstract: Quantum computers have grown rapidly in size and qubit quality in recent years, enabling the execution of complex quantum circuits. However, for most researchers, access to compute time on quantum hardware is limited. This necessitates the need to build simulators that mimic the execution of quantum circuits on noisy quantum hardware accurately and scalably. In this work, we propose TUSQ - Tracking, Uncomputation, and Sampling for Noisy Quantum Simulation. TUSQ is a simu- lator that can perform noisy simulation of up to 30-qubit Adder circuits on a single Nvidia A100 GPU in less than 820 seconds. To represent the stochastic noisy channels accurately, we average the output of multiple quantum circuits with fixed noisy gates sampled from the channels. However, this leads to a substantial increase in circuit overhead, which slows down the simulation. To eliminate this overhead, TUSQ uses two modules: the Error Characterization Module (ECM), and the Tree-based Execution Module (TEM). The ECM tracks the number of unique circuit executions needed to accurately represent the noise. That is, if initially we needed n1 circuit executions, ECM reduces that number to n2 by eliminating redundancies so that n2 < n1. This is followed by the TEM, which reuses computation across these n2 circuits. This computational reuse is facilitated by representing all n2 circuits as a tree. We sample the significant leaf nodes of this tree and prune the remaining ones. We traverse this tree using depth-first search. We use uncomputation to perform rollback-recovery at several stages which reduces simulation time. We evaluate TUSQ for a total of 186 benchmarks and report an average speedup of 52.5× and 12.53× over Qiskit and CUDA-Q, which goes up to 7878.03× and 439.38× respectively. For larger benchmarks (more than than 15 qubits), the average speedup is 55.42× and 23.03× over Qiskit and CUDA-Q respectively.

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9/25: Organizational Lunch

Time: Thursday, September 25, 2025, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: CoDa E401

Organizational lunch. Come sign up to give a talk during the quarter.

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10/2: Automated Formal Verification of a Software Fault Isolation System

Time: Thursday, October 2, 2025, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: CoDa E401

Speaker: Matthew Sotoudeh

Abstract: Software fault isolation (SFI) is a popular way to sandbox untrusted software. A key component of SFI is the verifier that checks the untrusted code is written in a subset of the machine language that guarantees it never reads or writes outside of a region of memory dedicated to the sandbox. Soundness bugs in the SFI verifier would break the SFI security model and allow the supposedly sandboxed code to read protected memory. In this paper, we address the concern of SFI verifier bugs by performing an automated formal verification of a recent SFI system called Lightweight Fault Isolation (LFI). In particular, we formally verify that programs accepted by the LFI verifier never read or write to memory outside of a designated sandbox region. Joint work with Zachary Yedidia.
The talk will be a short practice talk, and I'm hoping for feedback from attendees on the presentation. If time permits, I'll also give a practice talk for some garbage collection work and/or tell you about how I've been abusing dynamic linkers to make large software systems easier to hack on.

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10/9: Building Programming Systems for Near-Data-Processing: Theory and Practice

Time: Thursday, October 9, 2025, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: CoDa E401

Speaker: Yiwei Zhao

Abstract: Data movement has become the dominant cost in modern computer systems. Near-Data Processing (NDP)---also known as Processing-in-Memory (PIM)---is re-emerging as a promising approach to mitigate this cost by enabling computation resources embedded within memory modules. While considerable recent work has been published on the architectural and technological fronts, the theoretical and programming foundations of NDP remain under-explored. This absence of algorithmic analysis makes it difficult to identify the fundamental principles in the complicated design space. In this talk, we address two central questions in designing programming systems for NDP: How should programming models and algorithm design for NDP systems differ from traditional parallel or distributed settings? and What are the fundamental trade-offs and limitations inherent in NDP? To answer these, we focus in this talk on NDP-friendly indexing structures: specifically, PIM-optimized B-trees, radix trees, and space-partitioning indexes. Our designs directly address the fundamental tension between minimizing communication and maintaining load balance, achieving provable guarantees under arbitrary query and data skew. Experimental results on UPMEM’s 2,560-module PIM system show up to 59× speedups over prior state-of-the-art PIM indexes. Finally, we discuss how these NDP techniques generalize to end-to-end transactional (OLTP) databases on NDP platforms; and extend to broader programming systems for distributed and/or heterogeneous architectures.

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10/16: TBD

Time: Thursday, October 16, 2025, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: CoDa E401

Speaker: Keith Winstein

Abstract: TBD

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10/23: Fix: Externalizing Network I/O in Serverless Computing

Time: Thursday, October 23, 2025, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: CoDa E401

Speaker: Yuhan Deng

Abstract: We describe a system for serverless computing where users, programs, and the underlying platform share a common representation of a computation: a deterministic procedure, run in an environment of well-specified data or the outputs of other computations. This representation externalizes I/O: data movement over the network is performed exclusively by the platform. Applications can describe the precise data needed at each stage, helping the provider schedule tasks and network transfers to reduce starvation. The design suggests an end-to-end argument for outsourced computing, shifting the service model from ''pay-for-effort'' to ''pay-for-results.''
This is a practice talk, and feedback would be greatly appreciated.

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10/30: TBD (Souradip Ghosh)

Time: Thursday, October 30, 2025, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: CoDa E401

Speaker: Souradip Ghosh

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11/6: TBD

Time: Thursday, November 6, 2025, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: CoDa E401

Speaker: Rohan Chanani

Abstract: TBD

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11/13: TBD

Time: Thursday, November 13, 2025, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: CoDa E401

Speaker: Pu (Luke) Yi

Abstract: TBD

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11/20: TBD (Justin Lubin)

Time: Thursday, November 20, 2025, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: CoDa E401

Speaker: Justin Lubin

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12/4: TBD

Time: Thursday, December 4, 2025, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: CoDa E401

Speaker: Rupanshu Soi

Abstract: TBD

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