Rowan Vale
Port Alder, WA
I build storage systems that stay correct when machines fail.
PhD student at Example University, advised by Dr. Ada Advisor. Before that I built storage at Example Corp.
Now: a crash-consistency checker and a cache paper.
Open to research internships · Summer 2027. Back at Example University in the fall.
Results at a glance
- up to 40%lower p99 latencysrc · Bounded staleness, EXC ’24
- 12/12seeded crash bugs foundsrc · Tidepool
- 3s → 300msAPI latencysrc · Example Corp
Selected work
All projects- 01Mar 2025 – present
Tidepool
CLI · RustReplays crash points to find lost writes in key-value stores.
tidepool check ./db# 3 crash points replayed[CRITICAL] lost write after fsync reorder - 02Jan – May 2024
Lattice
Research artifact · GoThe lease protocol behind bounded staleness, with the benchmark harness from the paper.
Lower is better. A synthetic edge workload across 3 regions.
Research
PublicationsCaches at the edge serve stale data with no bound on how stale.
- 01
Bounded staleness
EXC ’24A lease protocol that caps staleness at a configured bound.
- 02
Crash replay
In preparationReplaying crash points to find lost writes.
One paper published; one in preparation.
TA, Distributed Systems (Fall 2025)
Experience
Full history- Jan 2025 – present
Graduate Research Assistant · Example University
Fault injection for storage engines.
- Jun – Aug 2024
Software Engineering Intern · Example Corp
Cache layer for the orders API.
- PhD, CS, Example University2025 – 2029 (expected)
- BS, CS, Example College2019 – 2023
News
Released Tidepool 1.0.
Ran my first Distributed Systems lab as a teaching assistant.
Presented bounded staleness at EXC ’24.