
Core Systems
Distributed systems for a large-scale geo-replicated infrastructure
About Core Systems
Facebook Core Systems researchers and engineers design and build the distributed systems that power Facebook’s infrastructure. Our work spans across the engineering spectrum of research, development, deployment, and production as we ensure that our systems run efficiently, reliably, and securely across millions of machines in tens of geo-replicated data center regions.
Core Systems performs forward-looking research in the area of distributed systems and architecture at a global scale. Billions of people rely on the services we build and manage to connect and communicate. Throughout the lifecycle of these distributed services, we encounter fundamental research challenges in multiple areas, including capacity management, configuration management, cluster management, deployment, distributed tracing, efficiency, fault tolerance, monitoring, performance, power management, reliability, routing, scalability, service discovery, and storage systems.
We build a strong collaboration pipeline with key experts in academia through Distributed Systems PhD fellowships, requests for proposals, faculty summits, as well as internships and visiting researcher programs.
In recent years, we’ve published work on cluster management (Twine, OSDI 2020), configuration management (Configerator, SOSP 2015), fault tolerance (Kraken, OSDI 2016; Maelstrom, OSDI 2018; Taiji, SOSP 2019), tracing (Canopy, SOSP 2017), data center power management (Dynamo, ISCA 2016), and consensus protocol (Delos, OSDI 2020). View our Publications for a list of all our published research.
Meet Our Team

Mahesh Balakrishnan
Software Engineer
Systems & Infrastructure

Michael Chow
Research Scientist
Systems & Infrastructure

Qingyuan Deng
Research Scientist & Software Engineer
Systems & Infrastructure

Jason Flinn
Software Engineer
Systems & Infrastructure

Lakshmi Ganesh
Research Scientist & Software Engineer
Systems & Infrastructure

Jonathan Kaldor
Research Scientist
Systems & Infrastructure

Thawan Kooburat
Software Engineer
Systems & Infrastructure

David Meisner
Engineering Manager
Systems & Infrastructure

Justin Meza
Research Scientist
Systems & Infrastructure
Latest Publications
All PublicationsVirtual Consensus in Delos
Mahesh Balakrishnan, Jason Flinn, Chen Shen, Mihir Dharamshi, Ahmed Jafri, Xiao Shi, Santosh Ghosh, Hazem Hassan, Aaryaman Sagar, Rhed Shi, Jingming Liu, Filip Gruszczynski, Xianan Zhang, Huy Hoang, Ahmed Yossef, Francois Richard, Yee Jiun Song
OSDI - November 4, 2020
Twine: A Unified Cluster Management System for Shared Infrastructure
Chunqiang (CQ) Tang, Kenny Yu, Kaushik Veeraraghavan, Jonathan Kaldor, Scott Michelson, Thawan Kooburat, Aravind Anbudurai, Matthew Clark, Kabir Gogia, Long Cheng, Ben Christensen, Alex Gartrell, Maxim Khutornenko, Sachin Kulkarni, Marcin Pawlowski, Tuomas Pelkonen, Andre Rodrigues, Rounak Tibrewal, Vaishnavi Venkatesan, Peter Zhang
OSDI - November 4, 2020
FlightTracker: Consistency across Read-Optimized Online Stores at Facebook
Xiao Shi, Scott Pruett, Kevin Doherty, Jinyu Han, Dmitri Petrov, Jim Carrig, John Hugg, Nathan Bronson
OSDI - November 4, 2020
Coordinated Priority-aware Charging of Distributed Batteries in Oversubscribed Data Centers
Sulav Malla, Qingyuan Deng, Zoh Ebrahimzadeh, Joe Gasperetti, Sajal Jain, Parimala Kondety, Thiara Ortiz, Debra Vieira
MICRO - October 17, 2020
Latest News
All News

November 11, 2020
Building a ubiquitous shared infrastructure using Twine
Engineering blog

August 17, 2020