Sachin Ashok

sachina3@illinois.edu

Curriculum Vitae

Google Scholar

GitHub

Our paper on application-aware cloud infrastructure was accepted at HotNets'26!

Passed my Ph.D. Preliminary Exam in December 2025!

Received the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award for CS 435 in Spring 2025!

Interned at Microsoft Research, Redmond in Summer 2024, optimizing latency and resource utilization for large-scale telemetry analytics!

TraceWeaver, our work on distributed tracing without application changes, was accepted at SIGCOMM '24!

Murphy, our work on diagnosing performance issues in distributed cloud applications, was accepted at SIGCOMM '23!

I'm a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, advised by Prof. Radhika Mittal and Prof. Brighten Godfrey. I expect to graduate in May 2027.

I'm on the job market for 2027! I'm seeking research scientist, research engineer, and systems/infrastructure engineering roles, particularly in distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and AI systems.

My research focuses on improving the performance and observability of cloud and microservice systems. I build deployable solutions for distributed request tracing, performance diagnosis, and slack-aware scheduling, often without modifying applications. More recently, I've been exploring scheduling and resource management challenges in AI infrastructure and agentic workloads.

Previously, I was a research intern at Microsoft Research in Redmond, working on optimizing latency and resource utilization in large-scale telemetry analytics systems. Before my Ph.D., I was a Research Fellow at Microsoft Research India, where I worked with Dr. Venkat Padmanabhan, Dr. Nagarajan Natarajan, and Dr. Johannes Gehrke on networking and cloud systems. I received my B.Tech. in Computer Science from NIT Trichy in 2018.

Outside of research, I listen to a lot of indie music ( on repeat lately), build custom mechanical keyboards My custom mechanical keyboard

, take fantasy football a little too seriously (2025 league champ, naturally), and enjoy stand-up comedy enough to have made a chart Scatter plot rating stand-up comedians

. I'm also pro reading, especially introductions, forewords, and those blurbs at the back of the books.

The Cloud Should Adapt to Its Applications, Not the Other Way Around!
Sachin Ashok^*, Karuna Grewal^*, Talha Waheed, Gangmuk Lim, Gerard Matthew, Aditya Prerepa, Brighten Godfrey, Justin Hsu, Radhika Mittal
HotNets'26 | HotNets 2026: Nineteenth ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks
pdf| cite

TraceWeaver: Distributed Request Tracing for Microservices Without Application Modification
Sachin Ashok, Vipul Harsh, Brighten Godfrey, Radhika Mittal, Srinivasan Parthasarthy, Larisa Shwartz
SIGCOMM'24 | ACM SIGCOMM 2024 Conference
pdf| cite| kubecon talk

Murphy: Performance Diagnosis of Distributed Cloud Applications
Vipul Harsh, Wenxuan Zhou, Sachin Ashok, Radhika N. Mysore, Brighten Godfrey, Sujata Banerjee
SIGCOMM'23 | ACM SIGCOMM 2023 Conference
pdf| cite| blogpost

Fast and Efficient Lookups via Data-Driven FIB Designs
Sachin Ashok^*, Aditi Partap^*, Ammar Tahir^*
FIRA@SIGCOMM'22 | ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Future of Internet Routing & Addressing 2022
pdf| cite

Data-Driven Network Path Simulation with iBox
Sachin Ashok, Shubham Tiwari, Nagarajan Natarajan, Venkata N. Padmanabhan, Sundararajan Sellamanickam
SIGMETRICS'22 | ACM SIGMETRICS / IFIP PERFORMANCE 2022
pdf| talk| cite

Leveraging Service Meshes as a New Network Layer
Sachin Ashok, P. Brighten Godfrey, Radhika Mittal
HotNets'21 | HotNets 2021: Twentieth ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks
pdf| talk| cite

Reinforcement Learning for Bandwidth Estimation and Congestion Control in Real-Time Communications
Joyce Fang, Martin Ellis, Bin Li, Siyao Liu, Yasaman Hosseinkashi, Michael Revow, Albert Sadovnikov, Ziyuan Liu, Peng Cheng, Sachin Ashok, David Zhao, Ross Cutler, Yan Lu, Johannes Gehrke
MLForSystems'19 | Workshop on ML For Systems at NeurIPS
pdf| cite

* = Equal contribution

Coordinated Slack-Aware Control for Microservices
Sachin Ashok, P. Brighten Godfrey, Radhika Mittal

Multi-Party Load Balancing in the Cloud
Talha Waheed, Sachin Ashok, P. Brighten Godfrey, Radhika Mittal, R. Srikanth

TierX: Adaptive Prioritization to Meet SLO Guarantees for Diverse Workloads
Gerard Matthew, Sachin Ashok, P. Brighten Godfrey, Radhika Mittal

Distributed Tracing Without the Pain!
KubeCon'22, Detroit, USA
video| slides

Data-Driven Network Path Simulation with iBox
ACM SIGMETRICS'22, Mumbai, India
video| slides

Leveraging Service Meshes as a New Network Layer
ACM HotNets'21, Virtual Event
video| slides

Internet in a Box: Enabling Data-Driven Network Simulation
ACM HotNets'20, Virtual Event
video| slides

Internet in a box (iBox): Simulating the Internet
APNIC, Online blog
blogpost| tweet