Haochen Pan

Current Research

My research focuses on distributed systems at the intersection of cloud and high-performance computing (HPC), with an emphasis on resilience and efficiency for AI-guided scientific workflows and time-sensitive data analysis.

• We developed Octopus (opens in new tab), a Kafka-based hierarchical event fabric for high-performance exchange of control and metadata events across cloud and HPC environments.
• Building on this, we designed Icicle (opens in new tab) (to appear at ISC High Performance 2026), a real-time metadata monitoring and indexing system for Lustre and IBM Storage Scale that integrates Octopus, Apache Flink, and Globus Search to provide live visibility and historical usage analysis.
• Last year, we developed Science-MCP (opens in new tab), which applies the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to expose these capabilities as discoverable and composable services for LLM-powered agents across heterogeneous cyberinfrastructure.

Selected Publications

The complete list is available on Google Scholar (opens in new tab) and my CV.

• [ISC HPC'26 (opens in new tab)]Icicle: Scalable Metadata Indexing and Real-Time Monitoring for HPC File Systems
  Haochen Pan, Ryan Chard, Song Young Oh, Maxime Gonthier, Valérie Hayot-Sasson, Geoffrey Lentner, Joe Bottigliero, Rachana Ananthakrishnan, Kyle Chard, Ian Foster
  Paper (opens in new tab)|Poster (opens in new tab)|Code (opens in new tab)
• [Preprint (opens in new tab)]Experiences with Model Context Protocol Servers for Science and High Performance Computing
  Haochen Pan, Ryan Chard, Reid Mello, Christopher Grams, Tanjin He, Alexander Brace, Owen Price Skelly, Will Engler, Hayden Holbrook, Song Young Oh, Maxime Gonthier, Michael Papka, Ben Blaiszik, Kyle Chard, Ian Foster
  Paper (opens in new tab)|Code[1 (opens in new tab), 2 (opens in new tab)]|Slides (opens in new tab)
• [FTXS'24 (opens in new tab)]Octopus: Experiences with a Hybrid Event-Driven Architecture for Distributed Scientific Computing
  Haochen Pan, Ryan Chard, Sicheng Zhou, Alok Kamatar, Rafael Vescovi, Valérie Hayot-Sasson, André Bauer, Maxime Gonthier, Kyle Chard, Ian Foster
  Paper (opens in new tab)|Code[1 (opens in new tab), 2 (opens in new tab)]|Slides (opens in new tab)|Video (opens in new tab)|Project Descriptions[1 (opens in new tab), 2 (opens in new tab)]|Tech Report (opens in new tab)
• [FGCS Vol. 153 (opens in new tab)]The Globus Compute Dataset: An Open Function-as-a-Service Dataset From the Edge to the Cloud
  André Bauer, Haochen Pan, Ryan Chard, Yadu Babuji, Josh Bryan, Devesh Tiwari, Ian Foster, Kyle Chard
  Paper (opens in new tab)|Dataset (opens in new tab)
• [OSDI'22 (opens in new tab)]Cancellation in Systems: An Empirical Study of Task Cancellation Patterns and Failures
  Utsav Sethi, Haochen Pan, Shan Lu, Madanlal Musuvathi, Suman Nath
  Paper (opens in new tab)|Poster (opens in new tab)|Code (opens in new tab)|Video (opens in new tab)
• [SOSP'21 (opens in new tab)]Rabia: Simplifying State-Machine Replication Through Randomization
  Haochen Pan, Jesse Tuglu, Neo Zhou, Tianshu Wang, Yicheng Shen, Xiong Zheng, Joseph Tassarotti, Lewis Tseng, Roberto Palmieri
  Paper (opens in new tab)|Poster (opens in new tab)|Code (opens in new tab)|Video (opens in new tab)|Tech Report (opens in new tab)

Projects

• 2026 Icicle (opens in new tab): scalable metadata indexing and real-time monitoring for HPC file systems
• 2025 Science MCPs (opens in new tab): Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers that connect AI assistants to scientific computing resources and data management services
• 2024 Diaspora (opens in new tab): a resilience-enabling event fabric for real-time scientific workflows across HPC systems
• 2021 Rabia (opens in new tab): a high-performance framework for state-machine replication within data centers
• 2020 BBB (opens in new tab): a configurable benchmarking suite for private blockchain systems
• 2019 Cars on the Grid (opens in new tab): a simulator for multi-hop broadcast in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs)
• 2019 NFSB (opens in new tab): an extensible benchmarking framework for storage systems of Network Functions
• 2019 GitHub Trending Timeline (opens in new tab): a full-stack Python application to track GitHub Trending repositories over time
• 2018 CCM (opens in new tab): tools and scripts for automated deployment and management of Cassandra clusters
• 2017 Eagle Vision (opens in new tab): an iOS app to notify Boston College students of open seats in courses