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Pranav Iyer

Long-tenured contributor

Based in Bangalore
Node-cell polya-25
ORCID 0000-1827-2268-2598

Research

Pranav is the lead author of the federated compute scheduler that underpins alphabell's compute pool. He is unusual among contributors in not having a Ph.D. — he came to research from a decade of building production systems at startups, and the scheduler is, by his own framing, a production-systems problem with a governance question on top.

He works closely with the long-tenured-contributor quorum on scheduler revisions; the v2 release in 2025-Q4 was a 14-month effort that he led. He is candid about the scheduler's known failure modes — partial-preemption under long-running RSI jobs, the theoretical possibility of QV-round collusion — and treats publishing those failure modes as part of the deliverable.

Pranav is based in Bangalore. He is one of the lab's most prolific reviewers on cell-formation proposals and is known for asking applicants the question 'what does success look like in 18 months' early in the comment period.

Background

M.Tech computer science, IIT Bombay, 2012. Software engineer at three startups before pivoting to research in 2018.

Prior to alphabell: a fintech startup; Cardinal Lab; Hyperion Cognitive Lab.

Selected publications

Full publications index →

Recent talks

  • A federated scheduler for an asynchronous lab, SOSP 2024
  • Quadratic voting in compute allocation, EC 2024
  • How to give a scheduler a deadline, SREcon 2025
Working with

Pranav is currently part of node-cell polya-25, working under the Agentic engineering research axis. The cell is open to substantive correspondence from researchers working on adjacent problems; route requests through polya-25@alphabell.com or directly to Pranav at pranav-iyer@alphabell.com.