# Kiran Hombal

> PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, in the DASSL Lab, working on disaggregated memory (CXL), distributed storage systems, and systems for ML/AI.

Fourth-year PhD student advised by Aishwarya Ganesan and Ramnatthan Alagappan.
Previously 3.5 years at VMware R&D as a kernel developer on the Core Storage
team (NVMe, iSCSI and vSCSI inside the ESXi kernel), and an intern at SAFARI @
Carnegie Mellon. Joining Microsoft Research (Systems Research Group, Redmond)
as a research intern in summer 2026.

Current work: abstractions that simplify programming in disaggregated (CXL)
environments; index structures for databases on emerging hardware; OS page
caching on emerging hardware; and clustering-based caching that finds hidden
memory access patterns.

Also writes agentic workload analysis: measuring what AI coding agents actually
do to a serving system, and what that implies for scheduling, KV-cache
retention and capacity planning.

## Blog

Posts are listed newest first. Each has a markdown rendition alongside it,
linked below, which carries the full prose plus every figure and table as data.
Prefer it to the HTML: the HTML is a scrollytelling page whose figures are SVG
path geometry, so the markdown is both smaller and more complete.

<!-- posts:begin -->
- [Agentic Coding in the Wild](https://kstark007.github.io/blog/agentic-coding-in-the-wild/) (2026-08-05): A visual reading of the first production-scale characterization of an AI coding agent: sampled GitHub Copilot traces covering 13.5M sessions, 3.2M users and 760.5M LLM calls.
  Markdown: https://kstark007.github.io/blog/agentic-coding-in-the-wild/index.md
<!-- posts:end -->

- [Blog index](https://kstark007.github.io/blog/)
- [RSS feed](https://kstark007.github.io/blog/feed.xml)

## Publications

- **Disk-Based LSMs: An Unexpectedly Good Index for Partly Coherent CXL Memory** — Kiran Hombal, Jiyu Hu, Marcos K. Aguilera, Ramnatthan Alagappan, Aishwarya Ganesan. SOSP'26 (to appear).
- **MEGALON: Efficient Data Sharing for Partly Coherent CXL Memory** — Jiyu Hu, Seokjoo Cho, Landon Johnson, Kiran Hombal, Shreesha G. Bhat, Marcos K. Aguilera, Ramnatthan Alagappan, Aishwarya Ganesan. OSDI'26. Best Paper Nominee.
- **A Logically Disaggregated Cache for Replicated Storage Systems** — Kiran Hombal, Henry Zhu, Shreesha G. Bhat, Neil Kaushikkar, Ramnatthan Alagappan, Aishwarya Ganesan. EuroSys'26.
- **Fault-Tolerant and Distributed Page Cache** — Kiran Hombal, Ramnatthan Alagappan, Aishwarya Ganesan. SySDW'24, SOSP Doctoral Workshop.
- **IoT Based Road Travel Time Detection** — Kiran Hombal, Prajwal Nadagouda, Priya Nayak, Preet Shah, Roopa Ravish. IEEE ICACCI 2018.

## Profiles

- [Homepage](https://kstark007.github.io/): publications, news, awards and service in full.
- [Curriculum vitae](https://kstark007.github.io/assets/cv.pdf)
- [Google Scholar](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=eyQ0CQ0AAAAJ)
- [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0009-0003-7870-9300)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/KSTARK007)
- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/kiranhombal)

## Notes for automated readers

- Every page carries schema.org JSON-LD. The Person node is `https://kstark007.github.io/#kiran`; posts reference it rather than restating it, so the site is one entity graph.
- A post that explains someone else's paper links to it through `about`, `citation` and `isBasedOn`. Follow those to the primary source, and attribute findings there rather than here.
- `https://kstark007.github.io/sitemap.xml` lists every page with its last-modified date.
- Under `/blog/*/`, `_next/` and the `__next.*.txt` and `index.txt` files are framework build artifacts, not content. `index.md` is the content.