Zhen Ping Khor

Ph.D. Student

University of Pennsylvania: Department of Computer and Information Science

NetDB@Penn; Distributed Systems Laboratory

I am a first year Ph.D. student with research interests in distributed systems and networking.

zpkhor [at] seas [dot] upenn [dot] edu
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About Me

I am a first-year CS PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania, advised by Prof. Boon Thau Loo. I am a member of the NetDB and DSLresearch groups. My current research focuses on load balancing in DAG-based Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) protocols across multiple system levels.

Previously, I collaborated on research exploring staged multiplexing for LLM inference, contributing to a co-authored publication at SoCC'25. My path to computer science systems research has been non-traditional, beginning with a background in Civil Engineering—a journey I've documented in this blog post.

Current Research

DAG-based BFT load balancing

Fall 2025 – Present Investigating load balancing strategies within Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) based Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) protocols. This work focuses on optimizing resource allocation across three architectural tiers—validators, workers, and executors—to alleviate bottlenecks and improve overall system throughput.

Publications

Tao Luo, Kelvin Ng, Zhen Ping Khor, Sidharth Sankhe, Boon Thau Loo, Vincent Liu."Multiplexed Heterogeneous LLM Serving via Stage-Aligned Parallelism." SoCC, 2025.

[PDF][DOI]

Zhen Ping Khor, Min Lee Lee, Soon Yee Wong, Abdullahi Ali Mohamed, Teck Leong Lau."Parametric study of embankment stabilization by pile reinforcement." IOP, 2023.

[DOI]

Blog

Thoughts on research, career pivots, and life as a PhD student.

Read my posts →