Sky Computing
Towards Utility Computing for the Cloud
News
April 8, 2026
Matei Zaharia awarded ACM Prize in Computing for contributions to data systems, enabling AI
Matei Zaharia, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences (EECS) at UC Berkeley, has been awarded the ACM Prize in Computing for his visionary development of distributed data systems and computing infrastructure. In the prize announcement, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) noted Zaharia’s development of open-source systems helped enable large-scale machine learning (ML), analytics and AI at a global scale. ACM is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, and their ACM Prize in Computing recognizes early-to-mid-career computer scientists whose work has had broad and lasting impact. Recipients receive a $250,000 prize, with financial support provided by an endowment from Infosys Ltd.
April 2, 2026
EECS researchers receive Laude “Slingshot” awards to advance next-generation AI systems
Three research projects featuring contributors from Sky Computing Lab have recently been selected for Laude’s Slingshot program.
March 4, 2026
OpenThoughts-Agent, Continual Learning Benchmark, and MAP announced as Slingshots // TWO projects with Laude Institute
These 14 projects from Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, CMU, UIUC, and Michigan are tackling production deployment, energy constraints, and continual learning. Several are building on infrastructure from Slingshots // ONE. Together, they show what happens when the right researchers get the right resources at the right time: research that ships, gets adopted, and moves the field forward.
November 18, 2025
vLLM is the top open source project on GitHub for 2025
2025’s top projects split between AI infrastructure (vllm, ollama, huggingface/transformers) and enduring ecosystems (vscode, godot, home-assistant).
October 21, 2025
EECS students drive AI innovation as Amazon PhD Fellows
Today, Amazon announced its new AI PhD Fellowship program, offering two years of funding to over 100 PhD students across nine universities. Ten of these inaugural fellowships have been awarded to graduate students from UC Berkeley EECS’ Sky Computing Lab, supporting cutting-edge research in core AI disciplines like machine learning, computer vision, and natural-language processing, ultimately driving innovations essential for the next evolution of practical AI.
Events
April 17, 2026
Sky Seminar: Aditya Akella (UT Austin) – Towards A Learning-Directed Operating System
Modern applications run on increasingly heterogeneous and dynamic platforms, yet today’s operating systems (OSes) still rely on rigid, locally optimized policies that are manually designed, weakly coordinated, and slow to adapt. As a result, even when resources are plentiful, performance and tail …
April 15, 2026
Dissertation Talk: Understanding Models When Everything Is a Vibe – Lisa Dunlap
I suppose all good things must come to an end…. Benchmarks have driven remarkable progress in AI, but as generative models get deployed for open-ended tasks, the hard problem has shifted from capability to understanding: what are our models actually doing, where do they fail, and do the signals…
April 10, 2026
Sky Seminar: Chris Fletcher (UCB) – Messages from across the event horizon: AI Agentic Design for Computer Architecture (and more generalizable learnings)
Agentic coding has just created a renaissance in software. But what about [digital] hardware? In this talk, I will describe my experiences using Agentic coding to solve problems in Computer Architecture. That said: **No hardware/Architecture experience required.** I will try to make the …
March 20, 2026
Sky Seminar: Amy Ousterhout (UCSD) – Software and Hardware Support for Fine-Grained Preemptive Scheduling
Preemptive scheduling has the potential to mitigate head-of-line blocking and improve performance for datacenter applications. However, server-side software today does not employ fine-grained (microsecond-scale) preemptive scheduling, largely due to the overheads of existing preemption mechanisms. I…
Publications
March 2026
BlendServe: Optimizing Offline Inference with Resource-Aware Batching.
March 2026
Title: An AI Stack: From Scaling AI Workloads to Evaluating LLMs.
February 2026
Quant VideoGen: Auto-Regressive Long Video Generation via 2-Bit KV-Cache Quantization.
February 2026
Qrita: High-performance Top-k and Top-p Algorithm for GPUs using Pivot-based Truncation and Selection.
January 2026
Delta Fair Sharing: Performance Isolation for Multi-Tenant Storage Systems.
January 2026
VisGym: Diverse, Customizable, Scalable Environments for Multimodal Agents.
January 2026
UCCL-EP: Portable Expert-Parallel Communication.
January 2026
Supporting Our AI Overlords: Redesigning Data Systems to be Agent-First.
January 2026
Supporting Our AI Overlords: Redesigning Data Systems to be Agent-First.
January 2026
Text2SQL is Not Enough: Unifying AI and Databases with TAG.
January 2026
SkyNomad: On Using Multi-Region Spot Instances to Minimize AI Batch Job Cost.
December 2025
Speculative Decoding: Performance or Illusion?
Recent Projects
Sky Computing Story
Berkeley’s computer science division has an ongoing tradition of 5-year collaborative research labs. Recent labs included the AMPLab (ended in 2016) and the RISELab. These labs have had significant impact in both academia and industry. Past labs publish their research at top conferences in systems, databases, and machine learning. On the industrial side, AMPLab and RISELab fostered several successful startups (Databricks, Opaque, Ponder, Anyscale, to name a few). We are excited to announce the Berkeley Sky Computing Lab where we will strike to make cloud computing a true commodity.
Context
The Sky Computing Lab represents the next chapter of data-intensive systems research at Berkeley. Recent years have seen the explosion of cloud computing. Applications are moving their data and computation to the cloud; on-premise services are dying. In doing so, companies have to make difficult choices between the myriad of cloud providers, each with different services or hardware. Lock-in, whether through artificial migration costs, legal constraints or engineering baggage is real. In the Sky Computing Lab, we will leverage distributed systems, programming languages, security, and machine learning to decouple the services that a company wants to implement from the choice of a specific cloud. Much like the Internet today, cloud computing should be an undifferentiated commodity. Applications should run seamlessly on any or multiple clouds.
Mission
Our mission in the Sky Computing Lab is to transform the cloud into an undifferentiated commodity and ease application burden. As in previous labs, we’re all in — working on everything from basic research to software development, all in the Berkeley tradition of open publication and open source software. Our founding team consists of experts in distributed systems, machine learning, security and programming languages. We’ll use this space to lay out our ideas and progress as we go.
Commitment to Diversity
Sky Computing is guided by Berkeley’s Principles of Community and is committed to providing a safe and caring research environment for every member of our community. We believe that a diverse student body, faculty, and staff are essential to the open exchange of ideas that Sky Computing Lab is founded on.
Our head is in the cloud. We are heading for the SKY.
Sponsors
