We are very happy to announce that Hamid Ghasemirahni successfully defended his PhD thesis (second and final one in the ERC ULTRA project) on November 18, 2024! Marco Chiesa has done a superb job as a co-advisor, and we are very grateful to Prof. Gerald Q. Maguire Jr. for his stellar insights (as usual). Gábor Rétvári was the opponent at the defense, while Paris Carbone served as the Chair. Hamid’s thesis is available online:

Realizing High-Performance Stateful Network Function Chains on Commodity Hardware: Improving Packet Processing Frameworks by Minimizing Memory Access Overheads

In short, this thesis contains the work on Reframer showing a surprising result that deliberately delaying packets can improve the performance of backend servers by up to about a factor of 2 (e.g., those used for Network Function Virtualization). It also includes FAJITA, which shows that a commodity server running a chain of stateful network functions can process more than 170 M packets per second (equivalent of 1.4 Tbps if payloads are stored in a disaggregated fashion as in our earlier Ribosome work [NSDI ’23]!).

A few images from the defense and the celebration are below.

Hamid presenting during the defense (image taken by Dejan Kostic).

Paris congratulates Hamid on the successfully defended PhD thesis (image taken by Dejan Kostic).

Dejan hands the traditional gift to Hamid (image taken by Voravit Tanyingyong).

Group image with colleagues and Dejan (image taken by Voravit Tanyingyong).

Group image (image taken by Voravit Tanyingyong).

We are happy to announce that Giacomo Verardo successfully defended his licentiate thesis (licentiate is a degree at KTH half-way to a PhD)! As usual, Marco Chiesa has done an excellent job as a co-advisor, and we are truly grateful to Prof. Gerald Q. Maguire Jr. for his stellar insights. Dr. Maxime Sermesant was a superb opponent at the licentiate seminar, with Prof. Vlad Vlassov as the examiner. Giacomo ’s thesis is available online:

“Optimizing Neural Network Models for Healthcare and Federated Learning”

Giacomo presenting during the defense (image taken by Massimo Girondi).

Dejan congratulates Giacomo once Prof. Vlassov announced that Giacomo passed his defense (image taken by Massimo Girondi).

Dejan hands the traditional gift to Giacomo (image taken by Voravit Tanyingyong).

Group image with Networked Systems Laboratory members (image taken by Sanna Jarl).

We are happy to announce that Massimo Girondi successfully defended his licentiate thesis (licentiate is a degree at KTH half-way to a PhD)! Marco Chiesa  has done an excellent job as a co-advisor and as is customary we are very grateful to Prof. Gerald Q. Maguire Jr. for his key insights. Giuseppe Siracusano was a superb opponent at the licentiate seminar, with Amir Payberah as the examiner. Massimo’s thesis is available online:

“Toward Highly-efficient GPU-centric Networking”

A few shots from the celebration are below.

Group shot of Networked Systems Laboratory members (Massimo is beneath the KTH logo). Image taken by Voravit Tanyingyong

Dejan hands the gift to Massimo a few weeks later in the hallway that Massimo chose for the shot. Definitely looks better than the opposite side we used in the past! (image taken by Voravit Tanyingyong)

Dejan is deeply honored to become a Wallenberg Scholar! This grant comes with 18 MSEK in funding over five years. More information is available at the KAW website.

We were once again at the ceremony at which KTH is officially awarding doctoral degrees. This time it was Alireza Farshin’s time, and we used the beautiful Stockholm City Hall to recreate our favorite hallway shot!