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About

I am a lecturer in Computer Science (assistant professor) at the University of St Andrews. I work on computer networks and system design with a strong focus from the application's perspective. My main interests include data storage systems, networking, scientific computing/HPC, and emerging AI applications. Before joining St Andrews, I was a senior researcher at the computing infrastructure group (led by Prof. Noa Zilberman) at the University of Oxford. Earlier, I was a research associate at the Network and Operating Systems Lab (led by Dr Michio Honda, Reader) at the University of Edinburgh. I hold a PhD in Computer Science from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden.


Publications

The full list of publications can be found on Google Scholar.

Conference publications

[1]
S. Li*, S. W. D. Chien*, T. Gao, and M. Honda, “Remote TCP Connection Offload and Applications,” Accepted for publication at USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI '26), 2026.
[2]
S. W. D. Chien, K. Sato, A. Podobas, N. Jansson, S. Markidis, and M. Honda, “ParaLog: Consistent host-side logging for parallel checkpoints,” in Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing, 2025, pp. 59-73.
[3]
T. Gao, X. Ma, S. Narreddy, E. Luo, S. W. D. Chien, and M. Honda, “Designing Transport-Level Encryption for Datacenter Networks,” in Proceedings of the 9th Asia-Pacific Workshop on Networking, 2025, pp. 142–149.
[4]
S. Li, S. W. D. Chien, T. Gao, and M. Honda, “Remote TCP Connection Offload with XO,” in Proceedings of the 9th Asia-Pacific Workshop on Networking, 2025, pp. 37–43.
[5]
Z. Chen, S. W. D. Chien, P. Qian, and N. Zilberman, “Detecting Anomalies in Machine Learning Infrastructure via Hardware Telemetry,” arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.26008, 2025.
[6]
S. W. D. Chien, K. Sato, A. Podobas, N. Jansson, S. Markidis, and M. Honda, “Improving Cloud Storage Network Bandwidth Utilization of Scientific Applications,” in Proceedings of the 7th Asia-Pacific Workshop on Networking, 2023, pp. 172–173.
[7]
S. W. D. Chien et al., “NoaSci: A Numerical Object Array Library for I/O of Scientific Applications on Object Storage,” in 2022 30th Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Network-based Processing (PDP), 2022, pp. 172–176.
[8]
S. Li, S. W. D. Chien, and M. Honda, “FlexPort: transport scale-out with modern NICs,” in Proceedings of the 3rd International CoNEXT Student Workshop, 2022, pp. 15–16.
[9]
A. Podobas, W. D. Chien, S. Markidis, M. Flatken, and A. Gerndt, “Workflows to Driving High-Performance Interactive Supercomputing for Urgent Decision Making,” in ISC High Performance Computing, 2022, p. 233.
[10]
M. Svedin, A. Podobas, S. W. D. Chien, and S. Markidis, “Higgs Boson Classification: Brain-inspired BCPNN Learning with StreamBrain,” in 2021 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing (CLUSTER), 2021, pp. 705–710.
[11]
N. Brown et al., “Utilising urgent computing to tackle the spread of mosquito-borne diseases,” in 2021 IEEE/ACM HPC for Urgent Decision Making (UrgentHPC), 2021, pp. 36–44.
[12]
A. Podobas et al., “StreamBrain: An HPC Framework for Brain-like Neural Networks on CPUs, GPUs and FPGAs,” in Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Highly Efficient Accelerators and Reconfigurable Technologies, 2021, pp. 1–6.
[13]
M. Svedin, S. W. D. Chien, G. Chikafa, N. Jansson, and A. Podobas, “Benchmarking the Nvidia GPU Lineage: From Early K80 to Modern A100 with Asynchronous Memory Transfers,” in Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Highly Efficient Accelerators and Reconfigurable Technologies, 2021, pp. 1–6.
[14]
S. W. D. Chien, A. Podobas, I. B. Peng, and S. Markidis, “tf-Darshan: Understanding Fine-grained I/O Performance in Machine Learning Workloads,” in 2020 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing (CLUSTER), 2020, pp. 359–370.
[15]
A. Podobas et al., “StreamBrain: An HPC DSL for Brain-like Neural Networks on Heterogeneous Systems,” in The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis, 2020, no. Poster Session.
[16]
S. W. D. Chien, I. B. Peng, and S. Markidis, “Posit NPB: Assessing the Precision Improvement in HPC Scientific Applications,” in PPAM 2019: Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics, 2020, pp. 301–310.
[17]
S. W. D. Chien, J. Nylund, G. Bengtsson, I. B. Peng, A. Podobas, and S. Markidis, “sputniPIC: an Implicit Particle-in-Cell Code for Multi-GPU Systems,” in 2020 IEEE 32nd International Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing (SBAC-PAD), 2020, pp. 149–156.
[18]
S. W. D. Chien, I. B. Peng, and S. Markidis, “Performance Evaluation of Advanced Features in CUDA Unified Memory,” in 2019 IEEE/ACM Workshop on Memory Centric High Performance Computing (MCHPC), 2019, pp. 50–57.
[19]
N. Brown et al., “The role of interactive super-computing in using hpc for urgent decision making,” in International Conference on High Performance Computing, 2019, pp. 528–540.
[20]
C. P. Sishtla, S. W. D. Chien, V. Olshevsky, E. Laure, and S. Markidis, “Multi-GPU acceleration of the iPIC3D implicit particle-in-cell code,” in International Conference on Computational Science, 2019, pp. 612–618.
[21]
S. W. D. Chien, S. Markidis, V. Olshevsky, Y. Bulatov, E. Laure, and J. Vetter, “TensorFlow doing HPC,” in 2019 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops (IPDPSW), 2019, pp. 509–518.
[22]
V. Olshevsky et al., “Automatic classification of plasma regions using 3D energy distributions,” 2019.
[23]
S. Markidis, S. W. D. Chien, and V. Olshevsky, “Accelerating Magnetospheric Modeling with Heterogeneous Hardware,” in AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts, 2019, vol. 2019, pp. SM12B-07.
[24]
S. W. D. Chien et al., “Characterizing deep-learning I/O workloads in TensorFlow,” in 2018 IEEE/ACM 3rd International Workshop on Parallel Data Storage & Data Intensive Scalable Computing Systems (PDSW-DISCS), 2018, pp. 54–63.
[25]
S. Narasimhamurthy et al., “The SAGE project: a storage centric approach for exascale computing,” in Proceedings of the 15th ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers, 2018, pp. 287–292.
[26]
S. W. D. Chien, S. Markidis, R. Karim, E. Laure, and S. Narasimhamurthy, “Exploring scientific application performance using large scale object storage,” in International Conference on High Performance Computing, 2018, pp. 117–130.
[27]
S. Markidis, S. W. D. Chien, E. Laure, I. B. Peng, and J. S. Vetter, “NVIDIA Tensor Core Programmability, Performance & Precision,” in 2018 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops (IPDPSW), 2018, pp. 522–531.

Journal publications

[1]
M. Flatken et al., “Vestec: Visual exploration and sampling toolkit for extreme computing,” IEEE Access, vol. 11, pp. 87805–87834, 2023.
[2]
M. Atzori et al., “In situ visualization of large-scale turbulence simulations in Nek5000 with ParaView Catalyst,” The Journal of Supercomputing, pp. 1–16, 2021.
[3]
V. Olshevsky et al., “Automated classification of plasma regions using 3D particle energy distributions,” Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, p. e2021JA029620, 2019.
[4]
C. P. Sishtla, V. Olshevsky, S. W. D. Chien, S. Markidis, and E. Laure, “Particle-in-cell simulations of plasma dynamics in cometary environment,” in Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 2019, vol. 1225, no. 1, p. 012009.

Thesis

[1]
W. D. Chien, “Large-scale I/O Models for Traditional and Emerging HPC Workloads on Next-Generation HPC Storage Systems,” phdthesis, Kungliga Tekniska högskolan, 2022.
[2]
W. D. Chien, “An Evaluation of TensorFlow as a Programming Framework for HPC Applications.” 2018.

Talks

[1]
S. W. D. Chien, “ParaLog: Consistent host-side logging for parallel checkpoints,” The SCOttish Networking Event (SCONE), Glasgow, United Kingdom, Jan 2026.
[2]
S. W. D. Chien, “Remote TCP Connection Offload with XO,” Ninth Annual UK System Research Challenges Workshop, County Durham, United Kingdom, 2025.
[3]
S. W. D. Chien, “Remote TCP Connection Offload,” NetDev conference 0x19, Zagreb, Croatia, 2025.
[4]
S. W. D. Chien, “Accelerating I/O for Traditional HPC and Modern ML Workloads on Emerging HPC Systems,” Doctoral Showcase, Supercomputing (SC), St. Louis, MO, USA. (Remotely due to COVID-19 restrictions), 2021.

Teaching

In 2026 S2, I will be teaching in the following courses.

At KTH, I was the teaching assistant in the following courses.


Services

I am/was on the following program committees.

Technical Program Committee for conferences

Workshop committees


Experiences

Research Projects

I was heavily involved in a number of European H2020 projects during my PhD:

In 2020, I did a summer internship and was subsequently a visiting student at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science's High Performance Big Data Team led by Dr. Kento Sato. Our collaboration resulted in a highly deployable and transparent distributed logging system, ParaLog. It accelerates MPI-based scientific applications using local storage resources and unused storage network during computation, while ensuring inter-node crash consistency of remote files. The system reduces the end-to-end execution time of several scientific applications on cloud HPC, large-scale HPC, and locally deployed clusters. It also enables directly use of cloud S3 object storage by MPI-IO, without using a customized data format or file system level interposition (e.g., FUSE). Our work was published in SoCC 2025.

Volunteering, Outreach, and Awards

Our project, secure message transport protocol (SMT), received the 2026 Applied Networking Research Prize (ANRP) by the IETF.

Since 2018, I have been a board member of Python Sverige, which organizes PyCon Sweden, the large Python event in the Nordics.

I won the best paper award at the 2018 AsHES workshop in IPDPS, where I co-authored a paper that characterized the Nvidia Tensor Core.

I helped run the UK & Ireland Programming Contest Edinburgh site between 2023 and 2025.

Other stuff...

Languages

  • English
  • Svenska
  • Deutsch (tourist level...)
  • 廣東話
  • C, C++, Python, Bash, Fortran (maybe), Java, ...

Hackathons

I won the Ultrahack 2017 Open Category in Helsinki, Finland, and the 2017 East Sweden Hackathon Best Project Award in Linköping, Sweden.


Contact