Alberto Lerner


Bio and Interests

I am a Senior Researcher at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland at the eXascale Infolab. Previously, I spent some time in research groups at IBM Research (both at T.J. Watson and Almaden), and in the industry, at Google and MongoDB – and some start-ups. I got my Ph.D. in 2003 at Ecole Normale Superieure de Telecomunications at Paris (now Paris Tech) having done the research work connected to my Thesis both at INRIA/Rocquencourt and at New York University.

My research interests revolve around non-conventional database systems. I mean non-conventional in three different aspects.

Recent Publications

  1. Michal Friedman, Sangjin Lee, Alberto Lerner, and Gustavo Alonso. “Understanding CXL: Memory, Coherence, and Opportunities in System Design.” 2025 International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (To Appear). ASPLOS’25, 2025. Bibtex
  2. Alberto Lerner, and Philippe Bonnet. Principles of Database and Solid-State Drive Co-Design. Synthesis Lectures on Data Management (To Appear). Springer, 2025. Bibtex PDF
  3. Kibin Park, Alberto Lerner, Sangjin Lee, Philippe Bonnet, Yong Ho Song, Philippe Cudré-Mauroux, and Jungwook Choi. “BABOL: A Software-Defined NAND Flash Controller.” In 57th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (To Appear). MICRO 2024, 2024. Bibtex PDF
  4. Alberto Lerner, and Gustavo Alonso. “Data Flow Architectures for Data Processing on Modern Hardware.” In 2024 40th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), 5511–22, 2024. Bibtex PDF
  5. Sangjin Lee, Alberto Lerner, Philippe Bonnet, and Philippe Cudré-Mauroux. “Database Kernels: Seamless Integration of Database Systems and Fast Storage via CXL.” In 14th Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR’24), 2024. Bibtex PDF
  6. Alberto Lerner, and Gustavo Alonso. “CXL and the Return of Scale-Up Database Engines.” Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment 17, no. 10 (2024): 2568–75. Bibtex PDF
  7. Alberto Lerner, Davide Zoni, Paolo Costa, and Gianni Antichi. “Rethinking the Switch Architecture for Stateful In-Network Computing.” In 23rd Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks. (HotNets’24), 2024. Bibtex PDF
  8. Alberto Lerner, Carsten Binnig, Philippe Cudré-Mauroux, Rana Hussein, Matthias Jasny, Theo Jepsen, Dan R. K. Ports, Lasse Thostrup, and Tobias Ziegler. “Databases on Modern Networks: A Decade of Research That Now Comes into Practice.” In To Appear in Proceedings of the 49th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB’23), 2023. Bibtex PDF
  9. Rana Hussein, Alberto Lerner, André Ryser, Lucas Bürgi, Albert Blarer, and Philippe Cudré-Mauroux. “GraphINC: Graph Pattern Mining at Network Speed.” In Proceedings of the 2023 International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD ’23), 2023. Bibtex PDF
  10. Jinwoo Jeong, Kibin Park, Sangjin Lee, Philippe Bonnet, Alberto Lerner, and Philippe Cudré-Mauroux. “Far-and-Near: Co-Designed Storage Reliability Between Database and SSDs.” In CIDR 2023, 13th Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research, 2023. Bibtex PDF
  11. Lukas Vogel, Daniel Ritter, Danica Porobic, Pınar Tözün, Tianzheng Wang, and Alberto Lerner. “Data Pipes: Declarative Control over Data Movement.” In CIDR 2023, 13th Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research, 2023. Bibtex PDF
  12. M. Tamer Özsu, Alberto Lerner, and Tianzheng Wang. “Reminiscences on Influential Papers.” SIGMOD Record 51, no. 2 (2022): 44–46. Bibtex PDF
  13. Alberto Lerner, Matthias Jasny, Theo Jepsen, Carsten Binnig, and Philippe Cudré-Mauroux. “DBMS Annihilator: A High-Performance Database Workload Generator in Action.” In Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 15:3682–85, 2022. Bibtex PDF
  14. Sangjin Lee, Alberto Lerner, André Ryser, Kibin Park, Chanyoung Jeon, Jinsub Park, Yong Ho Song, and Philippe Cudré-Mauroux. “X-SSD: A Storage System with Native Support for Database Logging and Replication.” Proceedings of the 2022 International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD ’22). New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2022. Bibtex PDF
  15. André Ryser, Alberto Lerner, Alex Forencich, and Philippe Cudré-Mauroux. “D-RDMA: Bringing Zero-Copy RDMA to Database Systems.” In CIDR 2022, 12th Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research, 2022. Bibtex PDF
  16. Theo Jepsen, Alberto Lerner, Fernando Pedone, Robert Soulé, and Philippe Cudré-Mauroux. “In-Network Support for Transaction Triaging.” In Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 14:1626–39, 2021. Bibtex PDF
  17. Alberto Lerner, and Philippe Bonnet. “Not Your Grandpa’s SSD: The Era of Co-Designed Storage Devices.” In Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD ’21), 2021. Bibtex Slides PDF
  18. Nadeen Gebara, Alberto Lerner, Mingran Yang, Minlan Yu, Paolo Costa, and Manya Ghobadi. “Challenging the Stateless Quo of Programmable Switches.” In Proceedings of the Nineteenth ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks, HotNets20, 2020. Bibtex PDF
  19. Alberto Lerner, Rana Hussein, André Ryser, Sangjin Lee, and Philippe Cudré-Mauroux. “Networking and Storage: The Next Computing Elements in Exascale Systems?.” IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin 43, no. 1 (March 2020): 60–71. Bibtex PDF
  20. Mourad Khayati, Alberto Lerner, Zakhar Tymchenko, and Philippe Cudré-Mauroux. “Mind the Gap: An Experimental Evaluation of Imputation of Missing Values Techniques in Time Series.” In Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), Vol. 13, 2020. Bibtex PDF Code Award
  21. Alberto Lerner, Jaewook Kwak, Sangjin Lee, Kibin Park, Yong Ho Song, and Philippe Cudré-Mauroux. “It Takes Two: Instrumenting the Interaction between In-Memory Databases and Solid-State Drives.” In CIDR 2020, 10th Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research, 2020. Bibtex PDF
  22. Alberto Lerner, Rana Hussein, and Philippe Cudré-Mauroux. “The Case For Network Accelerated Query Processing.” In CIDR 2019, 9th Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research, 2019. Bibtex PDF

Recent Professional Activities

(*) Distinguished reviewer awards