Zhihao Zhang

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Computer Science at Tsinghua University (advisor: Associate Prof. Youyou Lu). I reveived my Ph.D. degree at the Department of Computer Science, School of Informatics, Xiamen University (advisor: Prof. Jiwu Shu and Prof. Yiming Zhang).

My research centers on storage systems, with a particular emphasis on cloud storage and computing. My work has been published in top conferences like NSDI and FAST, and famous journals like TOS and TCAD.

Our research has also been adopted by both the open-source community and industry. In particular, our work, including PlanB, has been incorporated into OverlayBD, a prominent open-source project under the containerd organization. OverlayBD itself is deployed at scale by companies such as Alibaba Cloud, Azure, DeepSeek, and Kimi AgentENV (see its documentation).

Conference Papers

[C8] XCG: Decoupling Control from Configuration to Improve Cgroup Scalability with Flat Mapping.
Ruofan Xiong, Li Wang, Zhihao Zhang, Xinbiao Gan, Yiming Zhang.
ACM ATC'26. 2026. Accepted.

[C7] SqueezeDisk: Bridging High-Ratio Compression and Low-Amplification Decompression in Block Storage.
Zhihao Zhang, Qiao Li, Shiyu Wang, Huiba Li, Jiwu Shu, Kai Chen, Yiming Zhang.
ACM EMSOFT'26/IEEE TCAD. 2026

[C6] PlanB: Efficient Software IPv6 Lookup with Linearized B+Tree.
Zhihao Zhang, Lanzhen Liu, Chen Chen, Huiba Li, Jiwu Shu, Windsor Hsu, Yiming Zhang.
USENIX NSDI'26.

[C5] ParaSync: Exploiting Fine-Grained Parallelism for Efficient File Synchronization.
Zhihao Zhang, Lu Tang, Huiba Li, Yue Yu, Jiwu Shu, Yiming Zhang.
USENIX FAST'26.

[C4] SkySync: Accelerating File Synchronization with Collaborative Delta Generation.
Zhihao Zhang, Huiba Li, Lu Tang, Jiwu Shu, Yiming Zhang.
USENIX FAST'26.

[C3] AtomicDisk: A Secure Virtual Disk for TEEs against Eviction Attacks.
Hongliang Tian, Xinyi Yu, Shaowei Song, Qingsong Chen, Zhihao Zhang, Shiyu Wang, Weijie Liu, Erci Xu, Shoumeng Yan, Yiming Zhang.
USENIX FAST'25. 2025

[C2] OnionDisk: A Log-Structured Write-Optimal Virtual Block Device.
Shiyu Wang, Zhihao Zhang and Yiming Zhang.
ACM APSys'24. 2024

[C1] FlexMem: Proactive Memory Deduplication for Qcow2-Based VMs with Virtual Persistent Memory.
Weinan Liu, Zhihao Zhang, Xiangrong Liu, and Yiming Zhang.
ACM APNet'24. 2024

Journal Papers

[J5] CrossFS: Improving Cross-Domain File System Performance with CRDT-Based Metadata Synchronization.
Qiwen Ke, Yina Lv, Zhihao Zhang, Zhirong Shen, Yue Yu, Hailiang Chen, Zhenlong Song, Xinbiao Gan, Jiaxin Li, Dongsheng Li, Xin Yao, Meiling Wang, Yiming Zhang.
ACM Transactions on Storage. 2026.

[J4] Research on Automatic Parameter Tuning of DPU-based Key-Value Storage Systems.
Maoxin Ye, Jiahong Chen, Zhihao Zhang, Suzhen Wu, Jie Zhang, Hong Jiang, Bo Mao.
Acta Electronica Sinica (电子学报), 2026.

[J3] Tiered Cache-Sharing Service for Virtual Machine Images Based on Memory Pool.
Zhihao Zhang, Weinan Liu, Zhenlong Song, Xinbiao Gan, Yue Yu, Yiming Zhang.
IEEE Micro. 2025.

[J2] Efficient Block Storage in the Cloud.
Yiming Zhang, Zhihao Zhang, Yan Chen, Huiba Li, Haonan Wang, Ping Zhong, Shengyun Liu and Dongsheng Li.
IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD). 2024

[J1] Block-Level Image Service for the Cloud.
Huiba Li, Zhihao Zhang (Co-primary), Yifan Yuan, Rui Du, Kai Ma, Lanzheng Liu, Yiming Zhang, and Windsor Hsu.
ACM Transactions on Storage. 2024.