Peifeng just became my second student to finish PhD a few days ago after successfully defending his dissertation “Application-Aware Scheduling in Deep Learning Software Stacks.” This will be a big loss for the SymbioticLab as we will miss his presence and deep technical insights. Peifeng is joining Google to continue working on resource management systems for AI/ML.

Peifeng officially started his PhD in Fall 2017, but he started working with me on and off from the Fall before when he took EECS 582 with me as a master’s student at UM. Peifeng and his friend, Linh, were working on a term project on video captioning for that course, but Peifeng was interested into better designing systems for AI/ML instead of simply applying existing ML techniques to different use cases. Although I did not know anything about systems for AI/ML, Peifeng pulled me into this world. Since then, Peifeng has worked on several groundbreaking projects, including Salus and Fluid; Orloj, an even more exciting project is in the pipeline to be published. Salus was the first software GPU sharing solution that provided significantly higher utilization than NVIDIA MPS; Fluid was the first leverage the collective nature of jobs in hyperparameter tuning to improve GPU- and cluster-level utilizations. Orloj is the first inference system to provide predictable performance for dynamic DNNs while maintaining the best-in-class performance for traditional static DNNs. I enjoyed this journey thoroughly, learned a lot in the process, and am really proud to be called his advisor.

Peifeng is one of the best (ML) systems developers I have ever seen (and I have seen many luminaries over years). He cares more about doing his work than hyping them up. He is also unbothered by the publications rat race to the point of causing advisor anxiety.

I have no doubt he will be extremely successful in whatever he sets his mind to.