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I am a Professor of Computer Science at George Washington University and one of the directors of the GW Cloud Systems Lab. I teach and do research in the general areas of operating systems and distributed systems. I am particularly interested in how new virtualization technologies can provide application agnostic tools that improve performance, efficiency, and reliability in cloud computing data centers and software-based networks. My research focuses on practical, systems-level challenges created by emerging technologies in these areas. I received my Ph.D. in CS from UMass Amherst in 2011 and my B.S. in ECE from Rutgers University in 2005.

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Recent Courses

• Fall 2024: CS-4243W Senior Design
• Spring 2024: CS-4244 Senior Design II
• Spring 2024: CS 8901 Research & Evaluation Methods
• Fall 2023: CS-4243W Senior Design
• Spring 2023: CS 8901 Research & Evaluation Methods
• Fall 2022: CS-3411 Operating Systems
• Spring 2022: CS-2541 Database Systems and Team Projects
• Fall 2021: CS-8901 Research & Evaluation Methods
• Spring 2021: CS-2541 Database Systems and Team Projects
• Fall 2020: CS-6421 Distributed Systems
• Spring 2020: CS-3907.88/6907.87 Advanced Networking and Distributed Systems
• Fall 2019: On Paternity leave!
• Full course listing

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News

Some recent events:

• 11/4/2024: My student Cuidi Wei recently published a paper on monitoring low volume attacks using a combination of programmable switches, smartNICs, and hosts at the ICNT Workshop. Xinyu and Yuan will present our work on providing both strong isolation and high performance for network functions at SOCC later this month.
• 8/30/2024: My PhD student, Ratnadeep Bhattacharya, completed his degree! He’s been working at Google on cloud distributed systems. Congrats Deep!
• 6/1/2024: I was promoted to full professor! I am currently applying for promotion to Professor. This page may be useful for external evaluators.
• 1/1/2023-8/1/2023: I was Interim Department Chair for CS. Not much else got done!
• 7/12/2022: This spring, three of my PhD students had their first primary author papers accepted - congrats Xiaosu (paper at EdgeSys 22 on running chains of serverless functions), Cuidi (paper at SIGCOMM 5G-MEMU workshop on profiling 5G RAN software), and Ratnadeep (paper at ACSOS 22 on overload-aware load balancing in microservices)! Meanwhile, a great group of undergrads worked on issues related to load balancing in heterogeneous edge systems.
• 1/18/2022: This year we welcomed the first group of students to our Designing Trustworthy AI Systems NRT fellowship, sponsored by the NSF. I’m helping lead the interdisciplinary effort on smart and connected mobility.
• 11/11/2021: We recently presented papers at SOCC 21 on our Mu Serverless platform that comprehensively tackles load balancing, autoscaling, and placement for Edge environments, and at NFV-SDN on using SmartNICs for load balancing across NF middleboxes.
• 11/5/2021: Our research lab took a break and solved an escape room in a box… nobody was turned into a werewolf!
• 9/1/2021: Two of my former PhD students, Guyue Liu and Wei Zhang, will be staring faculty positions this fall! Wei will be at UConn and Guyue will join NYU Shanghai. Congrats ladies!
• 8/1/2021: I am excited to start a new project on using SDN and NFV to provide value based access control funded by the NSA’s NCAE-C program. The project is led by (GW alum!) Gedare Bloom from UCCS.
• 4/21/2021: Our work on building an “opportunistic” cache for serverless environments was presented at EuroSys!
• 9/1/2020: In summer 2020, I worked with a great set of undergraduate and graduate students!
• 8/20/2020: I helped organize the first IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Self-Organizing Systems (ACSOS 2020) as the PC Co-Chair. It was a great event that merged decades of history from the ICAC and SASO communities into a single joint conference.
• 7/17/2020: Our work on EdgeOS, a platform for Fine-Grained Isolation for Scalable, Dynamic, Multi-tenant Edge Clouds was presented at Usenix ATC 2020. EdgeOS can start new applications 170X faster than Linux processes (and 50,000X faster than containers).

Click for older news…

• 5/18/2020: Congratulations to graduates Michael Trotter (PhD), Yuxin Ren (PhD), Dennis Afanasev (BS) and Pat Cody (BS)!
• 4/8/2020: Our paper on model-based NFV load balancing will appear at HotEdge 2020.
• 10/25/2019: Congrats to Dennis Afanasev and Kevin Deems for winning the first place CS Undergraduate Poster award at the GW SEAS R&D Showcase!
• 7/10/2019: Congrats to Grace for being recognized as one of the N2Women Rising Stars! The award recognizes the “10 most impacting and inspiring women in networking” each year.
• 7/3/2019: Dennis Afanasev presented our paper at LANMAN 2019 on using programmable NICs for NFV and our UCR collaborators presented on reliability challenges for serverless computing at the edge.
• 6/20/2019: Our paper on autotuning Storm parameters using Genetic Algorithms was a runner up for the best paper award at ICAC 2019. Congrats Michael Trotter!
• 5/17/2019: This summer my students Zhen Ni will be interning at Nokia Bell Labs, Deep Battacharya will be working at IBM Research, and Guyue “Grace” Liu will graduate and move on to work with Vyas Sekar as a post doc at Carnegie Mellon University.
• 12/10/2018: We published papers at CoNext 2018 on network function resiliency and at Middleware 2018 on VM security.
• 9/1/2018: Our proposal on enhancing OpenNetVM as a community infrastructure has been funded by the NSF CRI program!
• 9/1/2018: Our proposal on providing secure “single use services” has been funded by the NSF SaTC program!
• 9/1/2018: Our proposal on managing Mobile Elastic Edge Clouds has been funded by the NSF CSR program!
• 8/20/2018: Our paper on modular TCP stacks for NFV services was been presented at SIGCOMM 2018 - congrats Grace! We also ran a day long tutorial on OpenNetVM and other NFV technologies at the conference.
• 6/1/2018: My Ph.D. students Wei Zhang (expertise in NFV and cloud) and Sunny Rajasekaran (expertise in clouds and virtualization) have defended their Ph.D. theses and are headed off to new exciting jobs! This summer Guyue Grace Liu will be interning at Microsoft Research - Cambridge working at the intersection of Networking and Machine Learning.
• 3/29/2018: GW undergrads, Pat and Nick, presented a demo of OpenNetVM at SOSR 2018, and Wei had a short paper on NFV security with MPX.
• 7/27/2017: My website is being modernized. An archive of the old site is available here.
• 6/18/2017: Our paper on CPU scheduling and backpressure for NF service chains will appear at SIGCOMM 2017 - congrats Wei and Sameer! Our joint work with HPE Labs on NFV interconnects will appear at the KBNets workshop.
• 5/26/2017: I have been officially promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure at GW! I’ll be on sabbatical for the 2017-2018 school year.
• 4/16/2017: I received the GW SEAS Outstanding Junior Researcher Award!
• 7/11/2016: Our ICAC 16 paper on using NFV to speed up Memcached load balancing by nearly 100X has been selected as a Best Paper Candidate! UPDATE: We won the inaugural Karsten Schwan Best Paper Award!
• 9/1/2015: I have received a grant from NSF’s Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace division. The project, titled EVADE: Evidence Assisted Detection and Evasion of Security Vulnerabilities will explore operating system and virtualization layer techniques to efficiently detect attacks before they are able to adversely affect a system.
• 12/3/2014: Congrats to my Ph.D. student Grace Liu for winning the HP Women of Openstack Scholarship!
• 9/12/2014: My NSF grant Software Defined Network Function Virtualization (SDNFV) - Flexible, High Performance Network and Data Center Virtualization has been approved. This work will be a collaboration with K.K. Ramakrishnan from UC Riverside.
• 1/5/2014: Our paper NetVM: High Performance and Flexible Networking Using Virtualization on Commodity Platforms has been accepted at NSDI 2014!
• 11/12/2013: My first Ph.D. student, Jinho Hwang has defended his thesis! Jinho will be starting a Post Doc at IBM Research TJ Watson next month.
• 1/14/2013: My NSF Career Award: Application-Agnostic, Distributed-Aware Cloud Platforms has been funded!
• 6/5/2012: Jinho presented our paper at IWQoS and won a Best Student Paper award!
• 10/24/2011: My PhD dissertation has been selected for an Outstanding Dissertation Award by the UMass Computer Science department (sponsored by Yahoo). It was also nominated for the ACM’s Doctoral Dissertation Award.
• 8/1/2011: I began as an assistant professor at George Washington University after finishing my Ph.D. at University of Massachusetts Amherst.

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Research Students

I have been fortunate to work with many excellent students!

Current Ph.D. students:

• Xiaosu Lyu
• Cuidi Wei
• Deng Pan (co-advised with Samer Hamdar)
• Yuan Gao

Past Ph.D. students:

• Ratnadeep Bhattacharya - PhD in 2024, now at Google
• Zhen Ni - PhD in 2021, now at VMware
• Michael Trotter - PhD in 2020, now at Metron
• Yuxin Ren (Co-advised with Gabe Parmer), now at Huawei
• Guyue Grace Liu - PhD in 2019, now Assistant Professor at Peking University
• Wei Zhang - PhD in 2018, now Assistant Professor at University of Connecticut
• Sundaresan Rajasekaran - PhD in 2018, now at Intel
• Jinho Hwang - PhD in 2013, was at IBM Research, now at Meta

The undergrad and MS students I’ve worked with have also gone on to great things: Catherine Meadows (BS ‘22, MS ‘23, Navy), Kevin Deems (BS ‘21, Vanguard->Meta->Cloudflare), Pat Cody (BS ‘20, Facebook), Dennis Afanasev (BS ‘20, Stateless->NASA), Mykola Yurchenko (BS ‘19, Facebook), Riley Kennedy (BS ‘19, Apple), Aaron Coplan (BS ‘19, Facebook), Kebo Duan (MS ‘19, Google), Neel Shah (BS ‘17, VMware), Phil Lopreiato (BS ‘17, Facebook), Harpreet Singh (MS ‘17, Stony Brook), Shaohua Duan (MS ‘16, Rutgers), Chenghu He (MS ‘16, EMC), Lucas Chaufournier (BS ‘15, UMass->Square), Rian Shambaugh (BS ‘15, UMass->FINRA).

MS Advising

If I am listed as your MS advisor, I can help you plan your degree. However, before sending me email you should check:

• this CS MS Advising FAQ if you are in the Computer Science Masters Program
• this Data Analytics MS Advising FAQ if you are in the Data Analytics Masters Program