Davide Rovelli

D2.09, Campus Est, Università della Svizzera Italiana, 6900 Lugano, Switzerland

I am a PhD candidate at USI’s SWYSTEMS, advised by prof. Patrick Eugster. I also am a research collaborator at SAP in the Cloud Innovation group. I work on distributed systems, specifically reliable and efficient datacenter services.

My research focuses on selective synchrony, namely designing and building systems using a novel hybrid synchronous/asynchronous practical design. By exploiting the reliability and programmability of datacenter hardware (e.g. SmartNICs) and networks, we build real-world systems that support timely communication and processing. We design and implement distributed coordination protocols, such as consensus, on top of the synchronous layer, achieving faster, simpler and more reliable distributed services.

Previously, I graduated in MEng Electronic and Software graduate from University of Glasgow. I worked in a bunch of places including as an intern at IBM Research Ireland, and as research engineer at Centrale Nantes’s HPC center.

Contact me via email and/or social profiles at the bottom of this page!

news

Sep 26, 2025	Nano-consensus, our novel synchronous consensus prototype on FPGA SmartNICs, has been accepted to SoCC’25!
Jun 10, 2025	Our paper on FiDe, a system for reliable failure detection, has been accepted to USENIX ATC 2025!
Apr 01, 2025	Starting an internship @ IBM research Ireland in the Next Generation Systems and Cloud group! I will collaborate with Christian Pinto in CXL-based disaggregated memory replication!

selected publications

Nano-consensus: ultra-fast, quorum-less consensus on the wire

Davide Rovelli, Christian Faerber, Graham McKenzie, and 4 more authors

In to appear ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing 2025 (SoCC’25), 2025

preprint

Bib PDF

@inproceedings{Nanoconsensus_Rovelli_SoCC25,
  author = {Rovelli, Davide and Faerber, Christian and McKenzie, Graham and Pahlevan, Ali and Darabi, Sina and Jahnke, Patrick and Eugster, Patrick},
  booktitle = {to appear ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing 2025 (SoCC'25)},
  title = {Nano-consensus: ultra-fast, quorum-less consensus on the wire},
  year = {2025},
  note = {preprint},
  volume = {},
  number = {},
  pages = {},
  url = {},
}

FiDe: Reliable and Fast Crash Failure Detection to Boost Datacenter Coordination

Davide Rovelli, Pavel Chuprikov, Philipp Berdesinski, and 3 more authors

In 2025 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC’25), 2025

Bib PDF Video

@inproceedings{FiDe_Rovelli_ATC25,
  title = {FiDe: Reliable and Fast Crash Failure Detection to Boost Datacenter Coordination},
  author = {Rovelli, Davide and Chuprikov, Pavel and Berdesinski, Philipp and Pahlevan, Ali and Jahnke, Patrick and Eugster, Patrick},
  booktitle = {2025 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC'25)},
  pages = {765-788},
  year = {2025},
  url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc25/presentation/rovelli},
}

Digital Cluster Circuits for Reliable Datacenters

Davide Rovelli and Patrick Eugster

In 2025 55th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks - Supplemental Volume (DSN-S), 2025

DOI Bib PDF

@inproceedings{DCCs_RovelliEugster_DSN25,
  author = {Rovelli, Davide and Eugster, Patrick},
  booktitle = {2025 55th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks - Supplemental Volume (DSN-S)},
  title = {Digital Cluster Circuits for Reliable Datacenters},
  year = {2025},
  volume = {},
  number = {},
  pages = {201-205},
  keywords = {Switches;Jitter;Software;Hardware;Software reliability;Safety;Integrated circuit reliability;Integrated circuit modeling;Digital circuits;Clocks},
  doi = {10.1109/DSN-S65789.2025.00065},
  url = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11068310},
}

Toward a Practical Deterministic Datapath for 6G End Devices

Davide Rovelli, Michele Dalle Rive, and Patrick Eugster

IEEE Network, 2025

DOI Bib PDF

@article{Det6g_RovelliDalleRiveEugster_ieee25,
  author = {Rovelli, Davide and Rive, Michele Dalle and Eugster, Patrick},
  journal = {IEEE Network},
  title = {Toward a Practical Deterministic Datapath for 6G End Devices},
  year = {2025},
  volume = {39},
  number = {3},
  pages = {75-82},
  keywords = {6G mobile communication;Standards;Reliability;Performance evaluation;Throughput;Servers;Protocols;Jitter;Intserv networks;Wireless sensor networks;Information rates;Throughput;Data centers;5G mobile communication},
  doi = {10.1109/MNET.2025.3551372},
  url = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10926895},
}