Sky Computing
Towards Utility Computing for the Cloud
News
May 7, 2025
PyTorch Foundation Welcomes vLLM as a Hosted Project
The PyTorch Foundation is excited to welcome vLLM as a PyTorch Foundation-hosted project. Contributed by the University of California – Berkeley, vLLM is a high-throughput, memory-efficient inference and serving engine designed for LLMs.
April 17, 2025
Broadcom expands support for UC Berkeley’s Sky Computing Lab
Following VMware’s long-standing sponsorship, Broadcom is deepening its collaboration with UC Berkeley’s Sky Computing Lab through a $4 million gift. This expanded collaboration reinforces a shared commitment to innovation and interoperability, building on both organizations’ histories of addressing complex industry challenges through cutting-edge research.
April 7, 2025
Ion Stoica and John Schulman recognized with UC Berkeley Achievement Awards
Stoica, a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, is the recipient of the 2025 Fiat Lux Faculty Award. The award recognizes a Berkeley faculty member whose extraordinary contributions advance the university’s philanthropic mission and transform its research, teaching. and programs.
February 21, 2025
Sky Computing Lab receives NVIDIA DGX B200 for AI research
This week, the Sky Computing Lab at UC Berkeley EECS became the first research institution in the nation to receive NVIDIA’s cutting-edge DGX B200 system.
February 19, 2025
Prof. Natacha Crooks named Sloan Fellow
The awards honor early career researchers who have demonstrated innovation and creativity.
Events
May 16, 2025
Dissertation Talk: Programming Models for Correct and Modular Distributed Systems – Shadaj Laddad
Distributed systems are a fundamental part of modern computing, but they are notoriously difficult to program. Developers must reason about a wide variety of non-deterministic behaviors, including message reordering, retries, and failures, all while also having to deal with the inherent concurrency …
May 15, 2025
Dissertation Talk: Algebraic Approaches to Distributed Data Systems – Conor Power
With the rise of cloud computing, software systems have become increasingly distributed. Distributed systems offer myriad benefits such as scalability, availability, and fault tolerance. However, they introduce complexity for the programmers of these systems to ensure correctness and hide non-determ…
May 9, 2025
Sky Seminar: Ana Klimovic (ETH Zurich) – Rethinking Cloud System Software and Abstractions for True Elasticity in the Cloud-Native Era
Resource elasticity is fundamental to cloud computing. The more quickly a cloud platform can allocate resources to match the demand of each user request as it arrives, the less resources need to be pre-provisioned to meet performance requirements. However, even serverless computing platforms — whi…
May 2, 2025
Sky Seminar: Adi Shamir (Weizmann Institute of Science) – How to Securely Implement Cryptography in Deep Neural Networks
The wide adoption of deep neural networks (DNNs) raises the question of how can we equip them with a desired cryptographic functionality (e.g, to decrypt an encrypted input, to verify that this input is authorized, or to hide a secure watermark in the output). The problem is that cryptographic primi…
Publications
April 2025
Smart Casual Verification of the Confidential Consortium Framework.
April 2025
SuperServe: Fine-Grained Inference Serving for Unpredictable Workloads.
April 2025
Why Do Multi-Agent LLM Systems Fail?
April 2025
A Framework for Evaluating Emerging Cyberattack Capabilities of AI.
April 2025
ColBERT-Serve: Efficient Multi-stage Memory-Mapped Scoring.
March 2025
SkyServe: Serving AI Models across Regions and Clouds with Spot Instances.
March 2025
MoE-Lightning: High-Throughput MoE Inference on Memory-constrained GPUs.
March 2025
Challenges and Paths Towards AI for Software Engineering.
March 2025
Bandwidth Allocation for Cloud-Augmented Autonomous Driving.
March 2025
Jenga: Effective Memory Management for Serving LLM with Heterogeneity.
March 2025
Prompt-to-Leaderboard.
February 2025
SkyStore: Cost-Optimized Object Storage Across Regions and Clouds.
Sky Computing Story
Berkeley’s computer science division has an ongoing tradition of 5-year collaborative research labs. Recent labs included the AMPLab (ended in 2016) and the RISELab. These labs have had significant impact in both academia and industry. Past labs publish their research at top conferences in systems, databases, and machine learning. On the industrial side, AMPLab and RISELab fostered several successful startups (Databricks, Opaque, Ponder, Anyscale, to name a few). We are excited to announce the Berkeley Sky Computing Lab where we will strike to make cloud computing a true commodity.
Context
The Sky Computing Lab represents the next chapter of data-intensive systems research at Berkeley. Recent years have seen the explosion of cloud computing. Applications are moving their data and computation to the cloud; on-premise services are dying. In doing so, companies have to make difficult choices between the myriad of cloud providers, each with different services or hardware. Lock-in, whether through artificial migration costs, legal constraints or engineering baggage is real. In the Sky Computing Lab, we will leverage distributed systems, programming languages, security, and machine learning to decouple the services that a company wants to implement from the choice of a specific cloud. Much like the Internet today, cloud computing should be an undifferentiated commodity. Applications should run seamlessly on any or multiple clouds.
Mission
Our mission in the Sky Computing Lab is to transform the cloud into an undifferentiated commodity and ease application burden. As in previous labs, we’re all in — working on everything from basic research to software development, all in the Berkeley tradition of open publication and open source software. Our founding team consists of experts in distributed systems, machine learning, security and programming languages. We’ll use this space to lay out our ideas and progress as we go.
Commitment to Diversity
Sky Computing is guided by Berkeley’s Principles of Community and is committed to providing a safe and caring research environment for every member of our community. We believe that a diverse student body, faculty, and staff are essential to the open exchange of ideas that Sky Computing Lab is founded on.
Our head is in the cloud. We are heading for the SKY.
Sponsors
