Microsoft at SOSP 2023

Systems Research at Microsoft

Microsoft systems research spans cloud sustainability, hardware innovation, robust security and privacy, and beyond. Learn more about our system groups, current projects, long-term initiatives, and cutting-edge tools across our global ecosystem.

AI Infrastructure 

The AI Infrastructure group at Microsoft Research Vancouver, BC, lays the foundation for systems, networking, and infrastructure essential to the future of the cloud and AI. They drive innovation by co-evolving AI and infrastructure through continuous feedback. This new group collaborates with the Azure team to realize ambitious objectives and welcomes candidates passionate about advancing AI-centric systems. 

Team member at SOSP: Qi Chen 

AI Systems

At Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA, research teams pioneer AI systems that are safe, efficient, reliable, programmable, scalable, secure, privacy-preserving, and fault tolerant. The work spans novel hardware and interconnects, efficient compute and communication infrastructure, whole-system compilation, optimization, and orchestration. Research directly impacts training, serving state-of-the-art large ML models and their applications at Microsoft, such as GitHub Copilot.

Research in Software Engineering (RiSE) (opens in new tab)

Systems Research Group – Redmond (opens in new tab)

Azure for Operators (AFO) Research

As former systems & networking researchers and engineers at Microsoft Research, they are now the Office of the CTO team in Azure for Operators (AFO OCTO). They are building research & technology in distributed systems, mobile systems, network verification, security, wide-area networking, and wireless networking to bring the power of the cloud to the 5G telecommunications industry.

Azure for Operators (AFO) Research

Azure Security and Privacy Research Group 

This group tackles public cloud security and privacy in Azure. Their pioneering work influences Microsoft products, industry vendors, and services. They focus on secure distributed computing, privacy-preserving ML, secure hardware, software security, and verified security/cryptography.

Azure Research (opens in new tab) 

Azure Systems Research

This group drives cutting-edge systems research in Azure. They focus on enhancing cost efficiency across Microsoft’s online services and datacenters. Projects include power management, sustainability, resource optimization, disaggregation, next-generation cloud platforms, and AI-driven systems. 

Azure Systems Research (opens in new tab)

Datacenter Performance and Efficiency

At Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA, research teams are devoted to advancing the performance and efficiency of cloud and operating systems. Some of their research projects include Demikernel datacenter OS, new programmable hardware and accelerators in datacenter systems, optimizing serverless infrastructure, power management and sustainability, VM allocation and resource harvesting, and disaggregation and oversubscription. In addition to system innovations, the team also designs new scalable algorithms. Many of these algorithms use ML in real-time to increase efficiency further. 

Cloud Operations Research (CORE) (opens in new tab) 

Systems Research Group – Redmond (opens in new tab) 

Networking Research Group (opens in new tab) 

Team member at SOSP: Irene Zhang 

Microsoft Research @ 198

Microsoft Research @ 198, located in Cambridge, UK, is committed to creating a sustainable cloud for the future. The team’s interdisciplinary experts in systems, optics, AI, and engineering reimagine cloud storage, computation, and networking. Projects include sustainable storage, optical optimization, and innovations in datacenter technology, robotics, and AI-driven design solutions. 

Cloud Systems Futures (opens in new tab) 

Team members at SOSP: Ant Rowstron, Burcu Canakci, Ioan Stefanovici, Miguel Castro, Richard Black, Sergey Legtchenko 

Systems and Networking Research Group 

Located in Microsoft Research Asia, this group has a rich history of designing, building, and optimizing systems and tools that drive Microsoft’s internal infrastructure and external services. The group collaborates with other teams to develop next-generation technologies, advancing both academia and industry. 

Systems and Networking Research Group (Asia)

Shanghai System and Engineering Group (opens in new tab) 

Team member at SOSP: Quanlu Zhang 

Systems at Microsoft Research India 

Microsoft Research India is an interdisciplinary team with expertise in programming languages, networking, distributed systems, cryptography, privacy and security. They are currently interested in candidates working at the intersection of AI/ML and systems to augment efforts in optimizing AI infrastructure and improving efficiency of AI/ML training and inference workloads. 

Systems | India (opens in new tab)

Systems Reliability and Security

At Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA, researchers come together to focus on systems reliability and security. Their goal is to develop tools for system developers to verify and secure protocols, debug, test, and enhance system reliability. Research combines distributed systems, networking, programming languages, software engineering, and ML techniques. They focus on safeguarding real-world systems, services, and sensitive data with recent work in confidential computing, zero-knowledge proof systems, and identity management. 

Cloud Systems Reliability – Redmond (opens in new tab) 

CRYSP – Cryptography, Security, and Privacy (opens in new tab) 

Team member at SOSP: Jonathan Mace