Peter (Shengzhou) Qiang
CS PhD student · University at Buffalo · distributed transactions & databases
About
I am a PhD student in Computer Science at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, advised by Prof. Haonan Lu. I work on distributed transactions and consistency protocols — building and rigorously evaluating distributed datastores. I like turning protocol theory into working systems: my code spans CockroachDB internals, TAPIR, Jepsen, and several self-built large-scale testbeds. I am seeking Summer 2027 software-engineering / research internships in database internals and infrastructure.
Research
SONIC — rethinking replication-critical read-only transactions
Shows that "replication-critical" read-only transaction designs are unnecessary: formalizes the SONIC and Remote-Read theorems and demonstrates them with two systems — Starry (a deep modification of UW's TAPIR, 300+ commits of C++) and an extended COPS-SNOW with chain replication — validated by self-built Jepsen falsifier suites.
Juicer — cutting tail latency of strict serializability without code changes
A transparent, proactive message-ordering layer inside gRPC interceptors that reorders transaction messages by timestamp before they reach data shards — cutting P99 latency by up to 75% and abort rates by up to 85% for strictly serializable concurrency control, with zero changes to database code.
EaaS — Evaluation-as-a-Service for distributed storage systems
An end-to-end framework that makes evaluating distributed storage systems easy, correct, and reproducible. I built its unified workload engine (YCSB, transactional YCSB-T, interactive TPC-C) and multi-language adapters for CockroachDB, Cassandra, and EPaxos-family protocols; our re-evaluation refuted EPaxos's published 3× throughput claim.
PRC — developer-intended consistency testing for distributed datastores
Directed implementation testing that turns community-known correctness pitfalls (e.g., timestamp inversion) into targeted tests — complementing random-exploration tools like Jepsen.
Publications
S.-Z. Qiang, et al. "Instantaneous cross-correlation function type of WD based LFM signals analysis via output SNR inequality modeling." EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing, 2021. (first author)
Six further co-authored papers in signal processing (Optik ×3, Physics Letters A, Mathematical Problems in Engineering, Chinese Journal of Electronics), 2021–2022.