Complete publications, most recent first (Google scholar, dblp)
Publication list in bibtex format



  • Zhiting Zhu, Newton Ni, Yan Sun, Zhipeng Jia, Nam Sung Kim, Emmett Witchel

    Lupin: Tolerating Partial Failures in a CXL Pod

  • Zhipeng Jia, Emmett Witchel

    Boki: Towards Data Consistency and Fault Tolerance with Shared Logs in Stateful Serverless Computing

  • Zhipeng Jia, Emmett Witchel

    The Key Ideas Behind Boki’s Shared Logs

  • Emmett Witchel

    Challenges and Opportunities for Systems Using CXL Memory  (slides,   abstract )


  • Henrique Fingler, Zhiting Zhu, Esther Yoon, Zhipeng Jia, Emmett Witchel, Christopher J. Rossbach

    Disaggregated GPUs for Serverless Functions


  • Henrique Fingler, Zhiting Zhu, Esther Yoon, Zhipeng Jia, Emmett Witchel, Christopher J. Rossbach

    DGSF: Disaggregated GPUs for Serverless Functions


  • Zhipeng Jia, Emmett Witchel

    Boki: Stateful Serverless Computing with Shared Logs  (slides)  (code)  (video)

  • Jongyul Kim, Insu Jang, Weleed Reda, Jaeseong Im, Marco Canini, Dejan Kostić, Youngjin Kwon, Simon Peter, Emmett Witchel

    LineFS: Efficient SmartNIC Offload of a Distributed File System with Pipeline Parallelism
     (slides)  (video)

  • Zhipeng Jia, Emmett Witchel

    Nightcore: Efficient and Scalable Serverless Computing for Latency-Sensitive, Interactive Microservices   (slides) (code) (video)


  • Thomas Anderson, Marco Canini, Jongyul Kim, Dejan Kostić, Youngjin Kwon, Simon Peter, Weleed Reda, Henry Schuh, Emmett Witchel,

    Assise: Performance and Availability via Client-local NVM in a Distributed File System  (slides PDF)  ( video)

  • Tyler Hunt, Zhipeng Jia, Vance Miller, Ariel Szekely, Yige Hu, Christopher J. Rossbach, Emmett Witchel

    Telekine: Secure Computing with Cloud GPUs  (slides pptx PDF)


  • Tyler Hunt, Zhipeng Jia, Vance Miller, Christopher J. Rossbach, Emmett Witchel

    Isolation and Beyond: Challenges for System Security  (slides PDF)


  • Yige Hu, Zhiting Zhu, Ian Neal, Youngjin Kwon, Tianyu Cheng, Vijay Chidambaram, Emmett Witchel

    TxFS: Leveraging File-System Crash Consistency to Provide ACID Transactions  (slides PDF)

  • Tyler Hunt, Congzheng Song, Reza Shokri, Vitaly Shmatikov, Emmett Witchel
    [ZDNet]   Arxiv

    Chiron: Privacy-preserving Machine Learning as a Service


  • Youngjin Kwon, Henrique Fingler, Tyler Hunt, Simon Peter, Emmett Witchel, Thomas Anderson

    Strata: A Cross Media File System

  • Youngjin Kwon, Hangchen Yu, Simon Peter, Christopher J. Rossbach, Emmett Witchel

    Ingens: Huge Page Support for the OS and Hypervisor

  • Yige Hu, Youngjin Kwon, Vijay Chidambaram, Emmett Witchel

    From Crash Consistency to Transactions  (slides PDF)

  • Zhiting Zhu, Sangman Kim, Yuri Rozhanski, Yige Hu, Emmett Witchel

    Understanding The Security of Discrete GPUs  (slides PDF)


  • Tyler Hunt, Zhiting Zhu, Yuanzhong Xu, Simon Peter, Emmett Witchel

    Ryoan: A Distributed Sandbox for Untrusted Computation on Secret Data  (slides PDF, pptx)  usenix

  • Youngjin Kwon, Hangchen Yu, Simon Peter, Christopher J. Rossbach, Emmett Witchel

    Coordinated and Efficient Huge Page Management with Ingens  (slides PDF, key)  usenix

  • Mark Silberstein, Sangman Kim, Seonggu Huh, Xinya Zhang, Yige Hu, Amir Watad, Emmett Witchel
    [Improved from OSDI 14]    TOCS 16

    GPUnet: Networking Abstractions for GPU Programs

  • Youngjin Kwon, Alan M. Dunn, Michael Z. Lee, Owen S. Hofmann Yuanzhong Xu, Emmett Witchel

    Sego: Pervasive Trusted Metadata for Efficiently Verified Untrusted System Services  (slides PDF, key)

  • Yuanzhong Xu, Tyler Hunt, Youngjin Kwon, Martin Georgiev, Vitaly Shmatikov, Emmett Witchel

    Earp: Principled Storage, Sharing, and Protection for Mobile Apps  (slides PDF, key )


  • Yuanzhong Xu, Emmett Witchel

    Maxoid: Transparently Confining Mobile Applications with Custom Views of State  (slides PDF key)


  • Mark Silberstein, Bryan Ford, Emmett Witchel

    GPUfs: The Case for Operating System Services on GPUs

  • Donald E. Porter, Michael D. Bond, Indrajit Roy, Kathryn S. McKinley, Emmett Witchel
    [Improved version of PLDI 09]   TOPLAS 14

    Practical Fine-Grained Information Flow Control Using Laminar

  • Sangman Kim, Seonggu Huh, Yige Hu, Xinya Zhang, Amir Watad, Emmett Witchel Mark Silberstein

    GPUnet: Networking Abstractions for GPU Programs  (slides)

  • Michael Z. Lee, Alan M. Dunn, Jonathan Katz, Brent Waters, Emmett Witchel

    Anon-Pass: Practical Anonymous Subscriptions

  • Yuanzhong Xu Alan M. Dunn, Owen S. Hofmann, Michael Z. Lee, Syed Akbar Mehdi, Emmett Witchel

    Application-Defined Decentralized Access Control  (slides pptx PDF) (code)

  • Mark Silberstein, Bryan Ford, Idit Keidar, Emmett Witchel
    TOCS 14

    GPUfs: Integrating a File System with GPUs


  • Michael Z. Lee, Alan M. Dunn, Jonathan Katz, Brent Waters, Emmett Witchel

    Anon-Pass: Practical Anonymous Subscriptions  (slides PDF, pptx)

  • Owen S. Hofmann, Alan M. Dunn, Sangman Kim, Michael Z. Lee, Emmett Witchel

    InkTag: Secure Applications on an Untrusted Operating System  (slides)

  • Mark Silberstein, Bryan Ford, Idit Keidar, Emmett Witchel
    [Runner-up best paper] ASPLOS 13

    GPUfs: Integrating a File System with GPUs  (slides)


  • Alan M. Dunn, Michael Z. Lee, Suman Jana, Sangman Kim, Mark Silberstein, Yuanzhong Xu, Vitaly Shmatikov, Emmett Witchel
    [Runner-up PET award] OSDI 12

    Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Machine: Protecting Privacy with Ephemeral Channels

  • (slides PDF, pptx) (video)

  • Emmett Witchel
    Keynote SYSTOR 12

    ACID: The Wrong Way To Think About Concurrency   (pptx)

  • Sangman Kim, Michael Z. Lee, Alan M. Dunn, Owen S. Hofmann, Xuan Wang, Emmett Witchel, Donald E. Porter

    Improving Server Applications with System Transactions  (slides PDF, pptx)


  • Christopher J. Rossbach, Jon Currey, Mark Silberstein, Baishakhi Ray, Emmett Witchel

    PTask: Operating System Abstractions To Manage GPUs as Compute Devices  (one-col)   (slides PDF, pptx)

  • Alan M. Dunn, Owen S. Hofmann, Brent Waters, Emmett Witchel

    Cloaking Malware with the Trusted Platform Module  (slides PDF, pptx)

  • Christopher J. Rossbach, Jon Currey, Emmett Witchel

    Operating Systems Must Support GPU Abstractions  (slides PDF, pptx)

  • Owen S. Hofmann, Alan M. Dunn, Sangman Kim, Indrajit Roy, Emmett Witchel

    Ensuring Operating System Kernel Integrity with OSck  (slides PDF, pptx)


  • Donald E. Porter , Emmett Witchel

    Transactional System Calls on Linux

  • Indrajit Roy, Srinath Setty, Ann Kilzer, Vitaly Shmatikov, Emmett Witchel

    Airavat: Security and Privacy for MapReduce (slides PDF, pptx)

  • Donald E. Porter, Emmett Witchel

    Understanding Transactional Memory Performance  (slides PDF, pptx)

  • Scott Wolchok*, Owen S. Hofmann*, Nadia Heninger, Edward W. Felten, J. Alex Halderman, Christopher J. Rossbach, Brent Waters, Emmett Witchel    * Both authors contributed equally

    Defeating Vanish with Low-Cost Sybil Attacks Against Large DHTs  (slides PDF, pptx)

  • This work was reported in the New York Times, a UT press release, and Communications of the ACM.

  • Christopher J. Rossbach, Owen S. Hofmann, Emmett Witchel

    Is Transactional Memory Programming Actually Easier?  (slides PDF, pptx)


  • Donald E. Porter, Owen S. Hofmann, Christopher J. Rossbach, Alex Benn, Emmett Witchel

    Operating System Transactions  (slides PDF, pptx)

  • Christopher J. Rossbach, Owen S. Hofmann, Emmett Witchel

    Is Transactional Memory Programming Actually Easier?  (slides PDF, pptx)

  • Emmett Witchel

    Considerations for Mondriaan-like Systems  (slides PDF, pptx)

  • Indrajit Roy, Donald E. Porter, Michael D. Bond, Kathryn S. McKinley, Emmett Witchel

    Laminar: Practical Fine-Grained Decentralized Information Flow Control  (slides PDF, pptx)

  • Donald E. Porter, Emmett Witchel

    Operating Systems Should Provide Transactions  (html)  (slides PDF, pptx)

  • Owen S.Hofmann, Christopher J. Rossbach, Emmett Witchel

    Maximum Benefit from a Minimal HTM  (slides PDF, pptx) )

  • Hany E. Ramadan, Emmett Witchel

    The Xfork in the Road to Coordinated Sibling Transactions  (slides PDF, ppt)

  • Hany E. Ramadan, Indrajit Roy , Maurice Herlihy, Emmett Witchel

    Committing Conflicting Transactions in an STM  (slides PDF, ppt)


  • Hany E. Ramadan, Christopher J. Rossbach , Emmett Witchel

    Dependence-Aware Transactions for Increased Concurrency  (slides PDF, ppt)

  • Christopher J. Rossbach  gave the talk.

  • Christopher J. Rossbach, Owen S. Hofmann, Donald E. PorterHany E. Ramadan, Aditya Bhandari, Emmett Witchel
    CACM 08

    TxLinux and MetaTM: Transactional Memory and the Operating System

  • Hany E. Ramadan, Christopher J. Rossbach, Donald E. Porter, Owen S. Hofmann, Aditya Bhandari, Emmett Witchel

    MetaTM/TxLinux: Transactional Memory For An Operating System


  • Christopher J. Rossbach, Owen S. Hofmann, Donald E. Porter, Hany E. Ramadan, Aditya Bhandari, Emmett Witchel
    [Audience choice award]  SOSP 07

    TxLinux: Using and Managing Transactional Memory in an Operating System  (slides PDF, ppt)

  • Justin Brickell, Donald E. Porter, Vitaly Shmatikov, Emmett Witchel

    Privacy-Preserving Remote Diagnostics  (slides PDF, ppt)

  • Owen S. Hofmann, Donald E. Porter, Christopher J. Rossbach, Hany E. Ramadan, Emmett Witchel

    Solving Difficult HTM Problems Without Difficult Hardware  (slides PDF, ppt)

  • Hany E. Ramadan, Christopher J. Rossbach, Donald E. Porter, Owen S. Hofmann, Aditya Bhandari, Emmett Witchel

    MetaTM/TxLinux: Transactional Memory For An Operating System  (slides PDF, ppt)

  • Jungwoo Ha, Christopher J. Rossbach, Jason V. Davis, Indrajit Roy, David L. Chen, Hany E. Ramadan, Emmett Witchel

    Improved Error Reporting for Software that Uses Black-Box Components  (slides PDF, ppt)

  • Donald E. Porter, Owen S. Hofmann, Emmett Witchel

    Is The Optimism in Optimistic Concurrency Warranted?  (slides PDF, key)

  • Jonathan Wildstrom, Peter Stone, Emmett Witchel, Mike Dahlin

    Machine Learning for On-Line Hardware Reconfiguration


  • Jason V. Davis, Jungwoo Ha, Christopher J. Rossbach, Hany E. Ramadan, Emmett Witchel

    Cost-Sensitive Decision Tree Learning for Forensic Classification (short paper)

  • Hany E. Ramadan, Christopher J. Rossbach, Emmett Witchel

    The Linux Kernel: A Challenging Workload for Transactional Memory  (slides PDF, ppt)


  • Emmett Witchel, Junghwan Rhee, Krste Asanović

    Mondrix: Memory Isolation for Linux using Mondriaan Memory Protection  (slides PDF, ppt)

  • Andrew Ayers, Chris Metcalf, Junghwan Rhee, Richard Schooler, Anant Agarwal, Emmett Witchel

    TraceBack: First Fault Diagnosis by Reconstruction of Distributed Control Flow  (slides PDF, ppt)

  • Jonathan Wildstrom, Peter Stone, Emmett Witchel, Raymond J. Mooney, Mike Dahlin

    Towards Self-Configuring Hardware for Distributed Computer Systems


  • Emmett Witchel
    Ph.D. dissertation, MIT 04

    Mondriaan Memory Protection

    Honorable Mention, ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award

    Winner of the MIT George M. Sprowls award for outstanding doctoral dissertation.

  • Emmett Witchel, Krste Asanović

    Hardware Works, Software Doesn't: Enforcing Modularity with Mondriaan Memory Protection  (slides PDF, ppt )


  • Emmett Witchel, Josh Cates, Krste Asanović

    Mondrian Memory Protection  (slides PDF, ppt)

  • Sam Larsen, Emmett Witchel, Saman Amarasinghe

    Increasing and Detecting Memory Address Congruence.

  • Krste Asanović, Mark Hampton, Ronny Krashinsky, Emmett Witchel
    Chapter from Power Aware Computing

    Energy-Exposed Instruction Sets

  • Emmett Witchel, Sam Larsen, C. Scott Ananian, Krste Asanović

    Direct Addressed Caches for Reduced Power Consumption  (slides)

  • Emmett Witchel, Krste Asanović

    The Span Cache: Software Controlled Tag Checks and Cache Line Size

  • David Mazières, Michael Kaminsky, M. Frans Kaashoek, Emmett Witchel.

    Separating key management from file system security

  • Emmett Witchel, M. Frans Kaashoek.
    MIT Tech Report

    Using Software-Extended Architectures for Software Simultaneous Multithreading  (notes)


  • While getting my masters, and for a year after, I worked for Mendel Rosenblum, in the SimOS simulation group, which is part of the FLASH project at Stanford university, where I helped write these papers. They deal with fast machine simulation via dynamic binary translation, a characterization of operating system services based on the machine simulation technology, and a paper about the entire machine simulation system, not just the part I wrote.

  • Emmett Witchel, Mendel Rosenblum

    Embra: Fast and Flexible Machine Simulation

    Visit the archive of the Embra website.

  • Mendel Rosenblum, Edouard Bugnion, Stephen A. Herrod, Emmett Witchel, Anoop Gupta

    The Impact of Architectural Trends on Operating System Performance

  • Mendel Rosenblum, Stephen A. Herrod, Emmett Witchel, Anoop Gupta

    Complete Computer Simulation: The SimOS Approach


  • My graduate student web site.