About Me

Hi! I’m Bowen, a PhD candidate in Computer Science at ETH Zürich🇨🇭, working with Professors Gustavo Alonso and Ana Klimovic to accelerate databases for heterogeneous computing platforms. My research explores how to unleash the full power of GPUs and advanced interconnects for high-performance data analytics. Along the way, I’ve worked with NVIDIA, Meta, Microsoft Gray Systems Lab, AWS Redshift, and Swisscom.

Prior to my PhD study, I obtained my Master’s degree (with distinction) also from ETH and Bachelor’s degree (First-Class honours) from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). You can find out more about my past experience in my resume.

News

Sep 2026

Presented our paper about query processing on distributed GPU clusters at VLDB 2026, Boston

Aug 2026

Gave a talk at Microsoft Gray Systems Lab

May 2026

Started a 13-week internship with NVIDIA Architecture Research Group in Santa Clara

May 2026

Submitted our latest work on benchmarking hybrid relational and vector processing on CPU-GPU platforms

Feb 2026

Submitted our latest work on Eiger, a high-performance library for GPU-based databases

Oct 2025

Gave a talk at ETH Zurich Systems Group lunch seminar

Sep 2025

Gave a talk at Velox Tech Talk at Meta

Earlier

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Publications

Aug 2026

Over the Memory Wall, Into the Instruction Wall: The New Bottleneck in GPU Data Processing

Sven Hepkema, Bowen Wu, Christos Kozyrakis, Yannic Chronis, Gustavo Alonso. Under submission. PDF

May 2026

To GPU or Not to GPU: Vector Search in Relational Engines

Vasilis Mageirakos, Joel André, Marko Kabić, Bowen Wu, Yannis Chronis, Gustavo Alonso. Under submission. PDF

Feb 2026

Eiger: An Efficient Library for GPU-based Data Analytics

Bowen Wu, Marko Kabić, Sven Hepkema, Vasilis Mageirakos, Christos Kozyrakis, Gustavo Alonso. Under submission. PDF

Aug 2025

Terabyte-Scale Analytics in the Blink of an Eye

Bowen Wu*, Wei Cui*, Carlo Curino, Matteo Interlandi, Rathijit Sen. To appear in VLDB 2026. PDF

Jun 2025

Cracking Vector Search Indexes

Vasilis Mageirakos, Bowen Wu, Gustavo Alonso. VLDB 2025. PDF

Jun 2025

Powerful GPUs or Fast Interconnects: Analyzing Relational Workloads on Modern GPUs

Marko Kabic, Bowen Wu, Jonas Dann, Gustavo Alonso. VLDB 2025. PDF

Feb 2025

Efficiently Processing Joins and Grouped Aggregations on GPUs.

Bowen Wu, Dimitrios Koutsoukos, Gustavo Alonso. SIGMOD 2025. PDF

Apr 2021

An Information-Theoretic Measure for Enabling Category Exemptions with an Application to Filter Bubbles

Chenyu Jiang*, Bowen Wu*, Sanghamitra Dutta, Pulkit Grover. BIAS@ECIR2021. PDF

Jun 2020

High Performance Distributed OLAP on Property Graphs with Grasper

Hongzhi Chen, Bowen Wu, Shiyuan Deng, Chenghuan Huang, Changji Li, Yichao Li, James Cheng. SIGMOD 2020. PDF