I am a Research Scientist at Facebook, Inc. in Menlo Park, California where I work on the Core Systems team. My goal is to design the most efficient and reliable data centers in the world. You might know me from LOLCODE.

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I received my PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania in 2018, where I was advised by Onur Mutlu. The topic of my thesis dissertation was, Large Scale Studies of Memory, Storage, and Network Failures in a Modern Data Center. In 2015 I was awarded a Google PhD Fellowship and in 2013 I was awarded a John and Claire Bertucci Graduate Fellowship. My PhD research focused on designing reliable, high-performance, and energy-efficient memory and storage architectures. I am a passionate lecturer who still has an itch to teach.

I received my MS at Carnegie Mellon University in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2014 and I received my BS in Computer Science at the University of California at Los Angeles in 2010. During the summer of 2014 I interned at Google, Inc. in Mountain View, California where I worked with Partha Ranganathan, Jichuan Chang, Kim Hazelwood, Joel Coburn, and Rama Govindaraju. From 2013 to 2015 I interned at Facebook, Inc. in Menlo Park, California where I worked with Qiang Wu, Sanjeev Kumar, and Yee Jiun Song. From 2006 to 2012 I interned at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, California under the guidance of Rich Friedrich, Partha Ranganathan, Mehul Shah, and Jichuan Chang.

I’m an avid music fan and I enjoy playing the electric bass guitar, keyboard, and synthesizers. I also enjoy graphic design, reading, writing, and, of course, programming. My hobby is curating a collection of Japanese housewares designed by shokunin, or masters. My favorite coffee roaster is Kickback Coffee in San Jose.

publications

data center infrastructure

Kaushik Veeraraghavan, Justin Meza, Scott Michelson, Sankaralingam Panneerselvam, Alex Gyori, David Chou, Sonia Margulis, Daniel Obenshain, Shruti Padmanabha, Ashish Shah, Yee Jiun Song, and Tianyin Xu; Maelstrom: Mitigating datacenter-level disasters by draining interdependent traffic safely and efficiently. In USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, 2018.

Justin Meza, Tianyin Xu, Kaushik Veeraraghavan, and Onur Mutlu; A large scale study of data center network reliability. In ACM Internet Measurement Conference, 2018.

Kaushik Veeraraghavan, Justin Meza, David Chou, Wonho Kim, Sonia Margulis, Scott Michelson, Rajesh Nishtala, Daniel Obenshain, Dmitri Perelman, and Yee Jiun Song; Kraken: leveraging live traffic tests to identify and resolve resource utilization bottlenecks in large scale web services. In USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, 2016.

Qiang Wu, Qingyuan Deng, Lakshmi Ganesh, Chang-Hong Raymond Hsu, Yun Jin, Sanjeev Kumar, Bin Li, Justin Meza, and Yee Jiun Song, Dynamo: Facebook’s data center-wide power management system. In International Symposium on Computer Architecture, 2016.

Tuomas Pelkonen, Scott Franklin, Justin Teller, Paul Cavallaro, Qi Huang, Justin Meza, and Kaushik Veeraraghavan; Gorilla: a fast, scalable, in-memory time series database. In International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, 2015.

Justin Meza, Qiang Wu, Sanjeev Kumar, and Onur Mutlu; A large-scale study of flash memory errors in the field. In ACM SIGMETRICS International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems, 2015. (Coverage on Hacker News, ZDNet, and The Register.)

Justin Meza, Qiang Wu, Sanjeev Kumar, and Onur Mutlu; Revisiting memory errors in large-scale production data centers: analysis and modeling of new trends from the field. In IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, 2015.

non-volatile memory

Onur Mutlu, Justin Meza, and Lavanya Subramanian; The main memory system: challenges and opportunities. In Communications of the Korean Institute of Information Scientists and Engineers, 2015. (Invited article.)

HanBin Yoon, Justin Meza, Naveen Muralimanohar, Norman P. Jouppi, and Onur Mutlu, Efficient data mapping and buffering techniques for multi-level cell phase-change memories. In ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimizations, 2014. (Best presentation award at HiPEAC 2015.)

Yixin Luo, Sriram Govindan, Bikash Sharma, Mark Santaniello, Justin Meza, Aman Kansal, Jie Liu, Badriddine Khessib, Kushagra Vaid, and Onur Mutlu; Characterizing application memory error vulnerability to optimize data center cost via heterogeneous-reliability memory. In IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, 2014. (Coverage on ZDNet.)

Justin Meza, Yixin Luo, Samira Khan, Jishen Zhao, Yuan Xie, and Onur Mutlu; A case for efficient hardware/software cooperative management of storage and memory. In Workshop on Energy-Efficient Design, 2013.

HanBin Yoon, Justin Meza, Rachata Ausavarungnirun, Rachael Harding, and Onur Mutlu; Row buffer locality-aware caching policies for hybrid memories. In International Conference on Computer Design, 2012. (Best paper award in computer systems and applications track.)

Justin Meza, Jing Li, and Onur Mutlu; A case for small row buffers in non-volatile main memories. In International Conference on Computer Design, 2012. (Poster session.)

Justin Meza, Jing Li, and Onur Mutlu; Evaluating row buffer locality in future non-volatile main memories. SAFARI Technical Report, 2012.

Justin Meza, Jichuan Chang, HanBin Yoon, Onur Mutlu, and Parthasarathy Ranganathan; Enabling efficient and scalable hybrid memories using fine-granularity DRAM cache management. In IEEE Computer Architecture Letters, 2012.

HanBin Yoon, Justin Meza, Rachata Ausavarungnirun, Rachael Harding, and Onur Mutlu; Row buffer locality-aware data placement in hybrid memories. SAFARI Technical Report, 2011.

data center energy efficiency

Jichuan Chang, Justin Meza, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Cullen Bash, and Amip Shah; Totally green: evaluating and designing servers for lifecycle environmental impact. International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, 2012. (Pick of the month in December 2012 IEEE Sustainable Computing Register.)

Jichuan Chang, Justin Meza, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Cullen Bash, and Amip Shah; Green server design: beyond operational energy to sustainability. In Workshop on Power-Aware Computing and Systems, 2010.

Justin Meza, Rocky Shih, Amip Shah, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Jichuan Chang, and Cullen Bash; Lifecycle-based data center design. In ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition, 2010.

Justin Meza, Mehul A. Shah, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Mike Fitzner, and Judson Veazey; Tracking the power in an enterprise decision support system. In International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design, 2009.

Stavros Harizopoulos, Mehul A. Shah, Justin Meza, and Parthasarathy Ranganathan; Energy efficiency: the new holy grail of data management systems research. In Conference on Innovative Data Systems, 2009.

Suzanne Rivoire, Mehul A. Shah, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Christos Kozyrakis, and Justin Meza; Models and metrics to enable energy-efficiency optimizations. In IEEE Computer, December 2007. (Cover feature.)

books

Justin Meza; Large scale studies of memory, storage, and network failures in a modern data center. ProQuest, 2018. (PhD thesis dissertation.)

John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson; Computer architecture: a quantitative approach. Fifth Edition, Elsevier, 2012. (Acknowledgement credit for chapter 6 exercises.)

patents

Managing an infrastructure housing disaggregated heat sources. A way to manage cooling in a datacenter with heterogeneous clusters of resources with different heat intensities.

Computer racks. Spine-like computer racks containing resource (compute, memory, storage, and so on) blades optimized for lifetime sustainability.

Data migration between memory locations. A policy to efficiently migrate data between different storage devices with different granularities of data access.

Storing cache metadata separately from integrated circuit containing cache controller. A technique to store and retrieve cache metadata without using expensive on-controller resources.

projects

LOLCODE: I wrote and maintain the most widely-used interpreter for the LOLCODE esoteric programming langugage. I now maintain the LOLCODE specification as well as its website.

httpd.lol: httpd.lol is a ridiculous bit of code that I wrote to implement a simple HTTP server written in LOLCODE.

inet: inet is a simple TCP/UDP communication library written in C. It abstracts away the icky socket and protocal interfaces into a more declarative host-based model of communication.

triad: triad is an implementation of the Chord peer-to-peer lookup service in C. It maps 64b integers to IP addresses and can be used as the underlying service-discovery layer for a distributed system.

wincurses: wincurses is an ncurses implementation for Windows terminal emulators.