Oana Balmau Mcgill

Professor Oana Balmau is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University, where she leads the Data-Intensive Storage and Computer Systems Laboratory (DISCS Lab). Her research focuses on storage systems and persistent memory technologies, with an emphasis on how data should be managed to efficiently support machine learning, data science, and edge computing workloads. Her work addresses the growing mismatch between modern data-intensive applications and existing storage infrastructures, aiming to design systems that are both high-performance and energy-conscious. A major contribution of her research is in systems for machine learning, where she plays a leading role as a working group chair for MLPerf Storage, a widely used benchmark for evaluating storage performance in ML pipelines. In parallel, her research on edge computing explores new frameworks for fast, secure, and hierarchical edge systems, including collaborative work within a DND IDEaS micro-net involving multiple Canadian universities. Professor Balmau completed her Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Sydney in 2020 under the supervision of Professor Willy Zwaenepoel, with dissertation research on efficient key-value stores for emerging hardware and performance requirements. She earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Computer Science from EPFL. She also holds affiliations with the University of Toronto and Mila, reflecting her strong engagement with the broader AI and systems research ecosystem. Their recent contributions to the field are exemplified by influential works such as "vPIM: Processing-in-Memory Virtualization", and "SpeedyLoader".