Michael Xi

Software Engineer, WAFL File System

File system performance and reliability for NetApp's ONTAP All-Flash platforms.

• Core engineer on NetApp Novus (AI-scale storage on ONTAP): prototyped and co-built write-path changes that decouple data flushing from checkpoints to remove write bottlenecks in highly concurrent AI workloads.
• Improved SAN write throughput and checkpoint flush latency on all-flash systems by dynamically scaling parallel flush threads.
• Built a kernel-level block allocation feature that speeds up test setup for disaggregated storage and substantially shortens targeted test runs.
• Root-caused and fixed critical production defects in the buffer cache and checkpoint code using GDB and core-dump analysis; backported fixes to customer releases.
• Extended a Python system-test framework to single-node and clustered configurations, improving test coverage and developer velocity.

• C
• C++
• Python
• File Systems
• Performance

Research Assistant, System Security Research Lab

Android kernel provenance data tracking, an Android kernel security mechanism.

• Implemented a C-based native daemon to capture and stream kernel-level provenance events; designed a high-throughput parsing pipeline to export system activity into structured JSON format.
• Built a Python analytical suite using NetworkX to reconstruct and visualize system-call dependency graphs, enabling identification of security anomalies in kernel provenance data.

Source on GitHub

• C
• Python
• Android
• Linux Kernel
• Security

Co-founder

Co-founded a group that builds apps for the Wake Forest community.

• WFU Eatery, a WeChat mini program with real-time traffic, food ratings, reviews, and upcoming menus for international students.
• WFU Covid, a dashboard that shows on-campus Covid data to parents of international students.

• Mobile Apps
• WeChat
• iOS