Michael Whittaker

About

I'm a software engineer at Google working on JAX. Previously, I worked on Service Weaver, a Go programming framework for writing and deploying cloud applications.

In 2021, I graduated with a PhD from UC Berkeley studying distributed systems and databases under Professor Joe Hellerstein as part of the RISE Lab. My thesis focused on making state machine replication protocols faster, simpler, and easier to implement. During grad school, I had the amazing opportunity to collaborate with Adriana Szekeres, Ailidani Ailijiang, Aleksey Charapko, Cristina Teodoropol, Dan Ports, Faisal Nawab, Heidi Howard, Ion Stoica, Irene Zhang, James B. Wendt, Jialin Li, Marc Najork, Murat Demirbas, Naveen Sharma, Neil Giridharan, Nick Edmonds, Peter Alvaro, and Sandeep Tata.

As an undergraduate at Cornell University, I researched under Professor Nate Foster and worked on a system called Felix which measures network traffic on end hosts by leveraging NetKAT.

Publications

• "Vive la Différence: Practical Diff Testing of Stateful Applications" Kexin Zhu, Michael Whittaker, Srdjan Petrovic, Robert Grandl, Sanjay Ghemawat. VLDB 2025. [code]
• "Towards Modern Development of Cloud Applications" Sanjay Ghemawat, Robert Grandl, Srdjan Petrovic, Michael Whittaker, Parveen Patel, Ivan Posva, Amin Vahdat. HotOS 2023. [code]
• "Matchmaker Paxos: A Reconfigurable Consensus Protocol" Michael Whittaker, Neil Giridharan, Adriana Szekeres, Joseph M. Hellerstein, Heidi Howard, Faisal Nawab, Ion Stoica. JSys 2021. [code] [Matchmaker Paxos visualization] [Matchmaker MultiPaxos visualization] [more info]
• "A Generalized Multi-Leader State Machine Replication Tutorial" Michael Whittaker, Neil Giridharan, Adriana Szekeres, Joseph M. Hellerstein, Ion Stoica. JSys 2021. [code] [more info]
• "Compartmentalizing State Machine Replication" Michael Whittaker. UC Berkeley PhD Thesis.
• "Scaling Replicated State Machines with Compartmentalization" Michael Whittaker, Ailidani Ailijiang, Aleksey Charapko, Murat Demirbas, Neil Giridharan, Joseph M. Hellerstein, Heidi Howard, Ion Stoica, Adriana Szekeres. VLDB 2021. [technical report] [talk] [code] [visualization] [more info]
• "Read-Write Quorum Systems Made Practical" Michael Whittaker, Aleksey Charapko, Joseph M. Hellerstein, Heidi Howard, Ion Stoica. PaPoC 2021. [code] [talk] [slides] [more info]
• "Interactive Checks for Coordination Avoidance" Michael Whittaker, Joseph M. Hellerstein. The VLDB Journal 2020.
• "Checking Invariant Confluence, In Whole or In Parts" Michael Whittaker, Joseph M. Hellerstein. SIGMOD Record, June 2020, SIGMOD Research Highlights Issue.
• "Meerkat: Multicore-Scalable Replicated Transactions Following the Zero-Coordination Principle" Adriana Szekeres, Michael Whittaker, Jialin Li, Naveen Sharma, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Dan Ports, Irene Zhang. EuroSys 2020.
• "Online Template Induction for Machine-Generated Emails" Michael Whittaker, Nick Edmonds, Sandeep Tata, James B. Wendt, Marc Najork. VLDB 2019.
• "Interactive Checks for Coordination Avoidance" Michael Whittaker, Joseph M. Hellerstein. VLDB 2019. [technical report] [code]
• "Debugging Distributed Systems with Why-Across-Time Provenance" Michael Whittaker, Cristina Teodoropol, Peter Alvaro, Joseph M. Hellerstein. SOCC 2018. [errata] [technical report] [code] [poster] [pdf slides] [keynote slides]
• "Felix: Implementing Traffic Measurement on End Hosts Using Program Analysis" Haoxian Chen, Nate Foster, Jake Silverman, Michael Whittaker, Brandon Zhang, Rene Zhang. SOSR 2016. [code] [powerpoint slides]