Pekka Enberg

Founder and CTO at Turso
Ph.D. Candidate at University of Helsinki

• Email: [email protected]
• ORCiD: 0000-0002-5661-2124
• Google Scholar: DjUpIwwAAAAJ
• GitHub: penberg
• X: @penberg
• LinkedIn: penberg

Bio

Pekka Enberg is a founder and CTO at Turso, working on the next evolution of SQLite. Pekka is also a PhD Candidate in Computer Science at the University of Helsinki.

He received his M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Helsinki in 2016. In the past, Pekka has worked on ScyllaDB, an Apache Cassandra-compatible low-latency, high-throughput distributed database system, as well as on the Linux kernel as a contributor and maintainer of dynamic memory allocators and the OSv unikernel, an operating system designed to run efficiently on the cloud.

Pekka is an expert in operating systems, databases, and virtualization. His current research interests are in agentic systems and the infrastructure that runs them, from operating systems and language model runtimes all the way down to hardware. Pekka is also the author of the book Latency: Reduce delay in software systems, published by Manning and available from Amazon.

Articles, Talks, and Podcasts

• Jul 2026: Chimera: Sandboxing Agents in Userspace
• Apr 2026: Swarm: Running Coding Agents in Parallel
• Mar 2026: Repairing Programs with AI Agents
• Jan 2026: Towards a Disaggregated Agent Filesystem on Object Storage
• Nov 2025: Assertions are not the problem; your verification process is
• Nov 2024: Deterministic Simulation Testing in Systems from HEL
• Oct 2024: Patterns of Low Latency in the P99 conference
• Sep 2023: Database on the Edge: Turso in The Distributed Fabric Pod
• Jun 2023: Beyond Cloud Computing: Towards the Edge at Future Frontend
• Apr 2023: Beyond Cloud Computing: Towards Serverless, Edge, and Sky Computing at Aurajoki Overflow
• Mar 15, 2022: Latency is Driving Edge and Serverless Computing Infrastructure
• Jan 30, 2020: On Parallel Programming
• Dec 18, 2018: On Kernel-Bypass Networking and Programmable Packet Processing
• Dec 30, 2017: The Evolution and Future of Hypervisors

Publications

Books

• Pekka Enberg (2025). Latency: Reduce delay in software systems. Manning. [Manning] [Amazon]

Conference

• Pekka Enberg, Ashwin Rao, Sasu Tarkoma (2019). The Impact of Thread-Per-Core Architecture on Application Tail Latency. In ANCS ‘19. [PDF] [Slides]
• Avi Kivity, Dor Laor, Glauber Costa, Pekka Enberg, Nadav Har’El, Don Marti, Vlad Zolotarov (2014). OSv-Optimizing the Operating System for Virtual Machines. In ATC ‘14. [PDF] [Code] [Slides]

Workshop

• Pekka Enberg, Sasu Tarkoma, Jon Crowcroft Ashwin Rao (2024). Serverless Runtime / Database Co-Design With Asynchronous I/O. In EdgeSys ‘24. [PDF]
• Pekka Enberg, Sasu Tarkoma, Ashwin Rao (2023). Towards Database and Serverless Runtime Co-Design. In CoNEXT-SW ‘23. [PDF] [Slides]
• Pekka Enberg, Ashwin Rao, Sasu Tarkoma (2019). Partition-Aware Packet Steering Using XDP and eBPF for Improving Application-Level Parallelism. In ENCP ‘19. [PDF]
• Pekka Enberg, Ashwin Rao, Sasu Tarkoma (2019). I/O Is Faster Than the CPU – Let’s Partition Resources and Eliminate (Most) OS Abstractions. In HotOS ‘19. [PDF] [Slides]

Theses

• Pekka Enberg (2016). A Performance Evaluation of Hypervisor, Unikernel, and Container Network I/O Virtualization. Master’s Thesis, University of Helsinki. [PDF]

Magazine

• Pekka Enberg, Ashwin Rao, Jon Crowcroft, Sasu Tarkoma (2022). Transcending POSIX: The End of an Era?. In USENIX ;login:. [URL]

Service

Program Committee

• 2026: AgenticOS: Co-designing Systems and ML Foundations of an OS Layer for Agentic AI, workshop at NeurIPS ‘26