At WASL, we focus on building the next generation of high-performance, reliable, and scalable distributed systems. Our efforts and expertise span from low-level file system designs to network optimizations to large-scale data storage and processing systems. We are exploring designs and methodologies for building highly efficient systems by leveraging recent advances in hardware technology (including software-defined networks, GPUs, FPGAs, and NVMs) and exploiting domain-specific optimizations (from big data analytics to high-performance science applications).