Malte Schwarzkopf

Eliot Horowitz Assistant Professor of Computer Science
ETOS and Systems Groups
Computer Science Department, Brown University

malte@cs.brown.edu
CIT 525

I'm interested in computer systems, especially distributed systems, operating systems, and privacy-preserving systems.

In Fall 2024, I'm not teaching. In Spring 2025, I'm co-teaching CSCI 1670/1690: Operating Systems with Tom Doeppner.

Outside of CS, I enjoy history, woodworking, biking, and art.

News

• 2024/07: Appointed Eliot Horowitz Assistant Professor of Computer Science.
• 2024/04: Received an Amazon Research Award for our work on tools for privacy compliance.
• 2023/05: The Omega paper wins the Test-of-Time Award at EuroSys 2023!
• 2023/05: Received a Barrett Hazeltine Citation for Excellence in Teaching, Guidance, and Support from Brown's Class of 2023.
• 2022/04: Received Brown's Henry Merritt Wriston Fellowship for 2022.
• 2021/04: Received a Google Research Scholar award.
• 2021/02: Received an NSF CAREER award for my work on privacy-compliance by construction in web applications.

Publications [all]

• Quicksand: Harnessing Stranded Datacenter Resources with Granular Computing
  Zhenyuan Ruan, Shihang Li, Kaiyan Fan, Marcos K. Aguilera, Adam Belay, Seo Jin Park, Malte Schwarzkopf
  To appear at NSDI 2025
  
• Sesame: Practical End-to-End Privacy Compliance with Policy Containers and Privacy Regions
  Kinan Dak Albab, Artem Agvanian, Allen Aby, Corinn Tiffany, Alexander Portland, Sarah Ridley, Malte Schwarzkopf
  To appear at SOSP 2024
  
• Edna: Disguising and Revealing User Data in Web Applications [ACM]
  Lillian Tsai, Hannah Gross, Eddie Kohler, Frans Kaashoek, Malte Schwarzkopf
  SOSP 2023
  
• K9db: Privacy-Compliant Storage For Web Applications By Construction [usenix] [code]
  Kinan Dak Albab, Ishan Sharma, Justus Adam, Benjamin Kilimnik, Aaron Jeyaraj, Raj Paul, Artem Agvanian, Leonhard Spiegelberg, Malte Schwarzkopf
  OSDI 2023
  
• Towards Increased Datacenter Efficiency with Soft Memory [SIGOPS] [ACM]
  Megan Frisella, Shirley Loayza Sanchez, Malte Schwarzkopf
  HotOS 2023
  
• Unleashing True Utility Computing with Quicksand [SIGOPS] [ACM]
  Zhenyuan Ruan, Shihang Li, Kaiyan Fan, Marcos K. Aguilera, Adam Belay, Seo Jin Park, Malte Schwarzkopf
  HotOS 2023
  
• Nu: Achieving Microsecond-Scale Resource Fungibility with Logical Processes [usenix]
  Zhenyuan Ruan, Seo Jin Park, Marcos K. Aguilera, Adam Belay, Malte Schwarzkopf
  NSDI 2023
  
• Retrofitting GDPR Compliance onto Legacy Databases [VLDB]
  Archita Agarwal, Marilyn George, Aaron Jeyaraj, Malte Schwarzkopf
  VLDB 2022
  
• Privacy Heroes Need Data Disguises [SIGOPS] [ACM]
  Lillian Tsai, Malte Schwarzkopf, Eddie Kohler
  HotOS 2021 Best presentation runner-up
  
• Tuplex: Data Science in Python at Native Code Speed [ACM] [web] [code]
  Leonhard F. Spiegelberg, Rahul Yesantharao, Malte Schwarzkopf, Tim Kraska
  SIGMOD 2021
  
• AIFM: High-Performance, Application-Integrated Far Memory [usenix] [code]
  Zhenyuan Ruan, Malte Schwarzkopf, Marcos Aguilera, Adam Belay
  OSDI 2020
  
• Shared Arrangements: practical inter-query sharing for streaming dataflows [VLDB]
  Frank McSherry, Andrea Lattuada, Malte Schwarzkopf, Timothy Roscoe
  VLDB 2020
  
• GDPR Compliance by Construction
  Malte Schwarzkopf, Eddie Kohler, M. Frans Kaashoek, Robert Morris
  Poly 2019 workshop at VLDB 2019
  
• Learning Scheduling Algorithms for Data Processing Clusters [ACM] [arXiv:1810.01963] [website]
  Hongzi Mao, Malte Schwarzkopf, Shaileshh Bojja Venkatakrishnan, Zili Meng, Mohammad Alizadeh
  SIGCOMM 2019 – (See also our related ICLR'19 paper on reducing variance in training!)
  
• Towards Multiverse Databases [ACM]
  Alana Marzoev, Lara Timbó Araújo, Malte Schwarzkopf, Samyukta Yagati, Eddie Kohler, Robert Morris, M. Frans Kaashoek, Sam Madden
  HotOS 2019
  
• Conclave: secure multi-party computation on big data [ACM] [extended TR (with proofs)] [code]
  Nikolaj Volgushev, Malte Schwarzkopf, Ben Getchell, Andrei Lapets, Mayank Varia, Azer Bestavros
  EuroSys 2019
  
• Noria: dynamic, partially-stateful data-flow for high-performance web applications [usenix] [website] [code]
  Jon Gjengset, Malte Schwarzkopf, Jonathan Behrens, Lara Timbó Araújo, Martin Ek, Eddie Kohler, M. Frans Kaashoek, Robert Morris
  OSDI 2018
  
• Firmament: fast, centralized cluster scheduling at scale [usenix] [web] [code] – Now available for Kubernetes!
  Ionel Gog, Malte Schwarzkopf, Adam Gleave, Robert N. M. Watson, Steven Hand
  OSDI 2016
  
• Queues don't matter when you can JUMP them! [usenix] [website]
  Matthew P. Grosvenor, Malte Schwarzkopf, Ionel Gog, Robert N. M. Watson, Andrew W. Moore, Steven Hand, Jon Crowcroft
  NSDI 2015 Best paper award
  
• Musketeer: all for one, one for all in data processing systems [ACM] [website] [code]
  Ionel Gog, Malte Schwarzkopf, Natacha Crooks, Matthew P. Grosvenor, Allen Clement, Steven Hand
  EuroSys 2015
  
• Omega: flexible, scalable schedulers for large compute clusters
  Malte Schwarzkopf, Andy Konwinski, Michael Abd-El-Malek, John Wilkes
  EuroSys 2013 Best student paper award Test-of-Time Award
  
• Ciel: a universal execution engine for distributed data-flow computing
  Derek G. Murray, Malte Schwarzkopf, Christopher Smowton, Steven Smith, Anil Madhavapeddy, Steven Hand
  NSDI 2011
  

Students

• Justus Adam
• Howie Chen
• Kinan Dak Albab
• Franco Solleza (with Stan Zdonik, Nesime Tatbul)
• Timothée Zerbib

• Artem Agvanian
• Aijah Garcia
• Katie Li
• Alexander Portland
• Sarah Ridley
• Corinn Tiffany

• Alumni:
• Allen Aby (MSc, → Microsoft)
• Megan Frisella (ScB, → University of Washington)
• Shirley Loayza Sanchez (ScB, → Google/Stanford University)
• Carolyn Zech (ScB, → AWS, Automated Reasoning Group)
• Lillian Tsai (PhD, at MIT with Frans Kaashoek, → Google Systems Research)
• Livia Zhu (ScB, → Databricks)
• Leonhard Spiegelberg (PhD, with Tim Kraska; → Snowflake)
• Sreshtaa Rajesh (ScB, → MIT Lincoln Labs)
• Raj Paul (ScB, → Oracle)
• Vic Li (MSc, → University of Washington)
• Benjamin Kilimnik (ScB → New Relic)
• Aaron Jeyaraj (ScB → Crusoe Energy)
• Hannah Gross (ScB, → MIT)
• Benjamin Givertz (ScB, → Twitch)
• Ishan Sharma (MSc, → AWS)
• Yunzhi Shao (MSc, → Amazon)
• Sinan Pehlivanoglu (MSc, → VMware)
• Eleonora Kiziv (ScB, → Google)
• Jon Gjengset (MIT PhD, → AWS)
• Jackie Bredenberg (MIT MEng, → Ab Initio)
• Samyukta Yagati (MIT UROP, → UC Berkeley)
• Gina Yuan (MIT MEng, → Stanford)
• Lara Timbó Araújo (MIT MEng, → Airbnb)

Courses

• Fall 2024: Henry Merritt Wriston Fellowship Leave on Special Assignment
• Spring 2024: CSCI 0300: Fundamentals of Computer Systems
• Fall 2023: CSCI 2390: Privacy-Conscious Computer Systems
• Spring 2023: CSCI 0300: Fundamentals of Computer Systems
• Fall 2022: Junior Faculty Teaching Relief
• Spring 2022: CSCI 0300: Fundamentals of Computer Systems
• Fall 2021: CSCI 2390: Privacy-Conscious Computer Systems
• Spring 2021: CSCI 0300: Fundamentals of Computer Systems
• Fall 2020: CSCI 2390: Privacy-Conscious Computer Systems
• Spring 2020: CSCI 1310: Fundamentals of Computer Systems
• Fall 2019: CSCI 2390: Privacy-Conscious Computer Systems
• Spring 2018: 6.824: Distributed Systems Engineering (at MIT)

Service

Program Committee:

• SOSP 2021, 2024.
• OSDI 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024.
• NSDI 2025.
• EuroSys 2016, 2021, 2023, 2024, 2025.
• VLDB 2025.
• ASPLOS 2025.
• HotNets 2025.
• USENIX ATC 2020.
• SoCC 2020, 2022.
• SYSTOR 2019.
• HotOS 2021.

Support

My research is supported by the NSF, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and VMware.

Personal

Before joining Brown, I was a postdoc in the PDOS group at MIT CSAIL. Prior to MIT, I spent several enjoyable years doing my PhD in the NetOS group in the other Cambridge.

You can find me on Twitter and GitHub. My wife, Julia Netter, is a political philosopher.