Between April 2 and November 12, the ChronoLog team published eleven releases, from 2.5.0 to 3.5.0. Over those seven months, GRC's distributed log store gained SQL, publish-subscribe and agent interfaces. It also learned to keep every event it acknowledges, even through a crash, and moved to a current HPC software stack. This is a summary of the year, release by release.
GRC researchers and collaborators presented twelve posters at the 13th Greater Chicago Area Systems Research Workshop (GCASR 2026) on May 11 at Northwestern University in Evanston. Taken together, the posters give a snapshot of the lab's work in spring 2026: how AI agents read and find scientific data, how multi-agent workflows run and recover, how workflows and logs move data, and how inference uses memory.
Xian-He Sun gave the third keynote of the 37th International Conference on Scalable Scientific Data Management (SSDBM 2025) in Columbus, Ohio, on June 24, 2025. In "The Data-Centric Imperative: from Hermes to StoreHub", he argued that storage systems must be redesigned for data-centric computing and that the community needs shared infrastructure to test those designs.
Xian-He Sun gave the first keynote of the IFIP International Conference on Network and Parallel Computing (NPC 2024) in Haikou, China, on December 7, 2024. Titled "Hermes, Coeus, and ChronoLog: Some big data I/O systems for network, parallel and distributed computing", the talk walked through three GRC systems that each attack a different part of the data access bottleneck.
Xian-He Sun gave a keynote at the 24th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Internet Computing (CCGrid 2024) in Philadelphia on May 7, 2024. In "AI & Data: Challenges and Opportunities in Computer System Research", he argued that data access, not computation, now limits how far computer systems scale, and showed three GRC systems built to address it.
The Department of Energy's FAIR program has announced an award to Illinois Tech (opens in a new tab) for "DTIO: Enabling Computational Storage using Data-Tasks and Asynchronous I/O", with Xian-He Sun as PI. The same list names Argonne National Laboratory as a partner on the project, with Franck Cappello and Bogdan Nicolae.
On April 18, 2023, the US Patent and Trademark Office granted U.S. Patent 11,630,834 B2 (opens in a new tab), "Label-Based Data Representation I/O Process and System", to Illinois Institute of Technology. The inventors are Anthony Kougkas, Hariharan Devarajan, and Xian-He Sun, and the patent covers the label-based I/O method behind LABIOS, which received the Karsten Schwan Best Paper Award at HPDC 2019.
The National Science Foundation has awarded a collaborative CSSI Framework grant (OAC-2104013) for ChronoLog, a distributed and tiered logging system designed for exascale high-performance computing systems and large-scale data centers.
Xian-He Sun gave a keynote at the 2020 International Conference on High Performance Big Data and Intelligent Systems (HPBD&IS 2020) on May 23, 2020. The talk, "dLABEL: A Label-Based Data Representation and its implementation on Big Data I/O Systems", proposed attaching operations to data through labels and showed the idea working in LABIOS, GRC's label-based I/O system.
The paper "LABIOS: A Distributed Label-Based I/O System" has received the Karsten Schwan Best Paper Award at the ACM 28th International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC 2019). The award, named in honor of the late Karsten Schwan for his contributions to high-performance systems, recognizes the best paper presented at the symposium.
Xian-He Sun gave the third keynote of the SIGMOBILE symposium at the ACM Turing Celebration Conference, China (ACM TURC 2019), in Chengdu on May 19, 2019. His talk, "Data Access of Big Data: Solving the system bottleneck", made the case that storage access limits big data systems, even mobile ones, and presented Hermes as GRC's response.