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Brent Stephens

Research Assistant Professor

The University of Utah

Biography

Broadly speaking, I am interested in most aspects of data center networking. I am especially interested in the intersection of network systems, operating systems, and computer architecture.

In addition to my interests in computer science, I enjoy participating in many hobbies, including music, kaizo Mario, biking, boarding, and brewing. I enjoy many types of biking, from commuting on a road bike to riding dirt jumps on a BMX or mountain bike.

Interests

  • Networking
  • Operating Systems
  • Data Center Applications

Education

  • Postdoctoral Researcher, 2015-2018

    UW-Madison

  • PhD, Computer Science, 2015

    Rice University

  • MS, Computer Science, 2012

    Rice University

  • BS, Electrical Engineering, 2009

    Rice University

Recent Highlights

NSF CCRI: Planning-C: TopoCloud: A New Community Testbed With Unique Network Topology Flexibility

NSF 2022

NSF CNS Core: Small: Network-wide Policy Enforcement in Programmable Networks using Logical Queues

NSF 2020

NSF CAREER: NIC-Accelerated Active Messaging as a Generic Replacement for RDMA

NSF 2020
This proposal aims to fundamentally rethink the design of server-side networking and develop new networking abstractions for Network Interface Card (NIC) accelerated messaging.

NSF CRII: NeTS: Rethinking Flow Control for Cloud Data Center Networks

NSF 2019
This proposal makes the case for fundamentally rethinking how queuing and flow control are performed in both physical and virtual switches.

Google Faculty Research Award

Google 2018

Research Interests

I am looking for motivated and passionate students. If you are interested in working with me, please feel free to reach out and start a conversation with me. My interests in computer science are broad, and I am willing to entertain any compelling projects. However, I am currently particularly interested in the following research areas:

  • Designing new switch programs that fundamentally rethink flow control, e.g., how switch should drop packets, and how switches should avoid dropping packets.

  • New architectures for reconfigurable match table (RMT) switches and NICs.

  • Explicitly co-scheduling network and CPU resources so as to maximize high-level application and infrastructure objectives.

  • Integrating programmable NICs and switches into the OS and network core by developing new protocols and offloads that treat the servers and network in a cluster as a single heterogeneous processor.

  • New abstractions and frameworks for developing microservices and function chains.

Selected Publications

Henry N. Schuh, Arvind Krishnamurthy, David E. Culler, Henry M. Levy, Luigi Rizzo, Samira Khan, Brent E. Stephens
April 2024 ASPLOS

CC-NIC: A Cache-Coherent Interface to the NIC

Korakit Seemakhupt, Brent E. Stephens, Samira Khan, Sihang Liu, Hassan Wassel, Soheil Hassas Yeganeh, Alex C. Snoeren, Arvind Krishnamurthy, David E. Culler, Henry M. Levy
October 2023 SOSP

A Cloud-Scale Characterization of Remote Procedure Calls

April 2023 NSDI

RingLeader: Efficiently Offloading Intra-Server Orchestration to NICs

April 2022 NSDI

Backdraft: a Lossless Virtual Switch that Prevents the Slow Receiver Problem

November 2021 HotNets

TCP is Harmful to In-Network Computing: Designing a Message-Oriented Transport Protocol (MTP)

PDF Video
November 2020 OSDI

PANIC: A High-Performance Programmable NIC for Multi-tenant Networks

PDF

Publications

See here or Google Scholar for a full publication list
Henry N. Schuh, Arvind Krishnamurthy, David E. Culler, Henry M. Levy, Luigi Rizzo, Samira Khan, Brent E. Stephens . CC-NIC: A Cache-Coherent Interface to the NIC. ASPLOS, 2024.

Tao Ji, Divyanshu Saxena, Brent E. Stephens, Aditya Akella . Yama: Providing Performance Isolation for Black-Box Offloads. SoCC, 2023.

Korakit Seemakhupt, Brent E. Stephens, Samira Khan, Sihang Liu, Hassan Wassel, Soheil Hassas Yeganeh, Alex C. Snoeren, Arvind Krishnamurthy, David E. Culler, Henry M. Levy . A Cloud-Scale Characterization of Remote Procedure Calls. SOSP, 2023.

Jiaxin Lin, Adney Cardoza, Tarannum Khan, Yeonju Ro, Brent E. Stephens, Hassan Wassel, Aditya Akella . RingLeader: Efficiently Offloading Intra-Server Orchestration to NICs. NSDI, 2023.

Alireza Sanaee, Farbod Shahinfar, Brent E. Stephens, Gianni Antichi . Backdraft: a Lossless Virtual Switch that Prevents the Slow Receiver Problem. NSDI, 2022.

Yiwen Zhang, Yue Tan, Brent Stephens, Mosharaf Chowdhury . Software Multi-Tenancy in Hardware Kernel-Bypass Networks. NSDI, 2022.

Brent E. Stephens, Darius Grassi, Hamidreza Almasi, Balajee Vamanan, Aditya Akella . TCP is Harmful to In-Network Computing: Designing a Message-Oriented Transport Protocol (MTP). HotNets, 2021.

PDF Video

Vineeth Sagar Thapeta, Komal Shinde, Mojtaba Malekpourshahraki, Darius Grassi, Balajee Vamanan, Brent Stephens . Nimble: Scalable TCP-Friendly Programmable In-Network Rate-Limiting. SOSR, 2021.

PDF

Jiaxin Lin, Kiran Patel, Brent E. Stephens, Anirudh Sivaraman, Aditya Akella . PANIC: A High-Performance Programmable NIC for Multi-tenant Networks. OSDI, 2020.

PDF

Yanfang Le, Mojtaba Malekpourshahraki, Brent Stephens, Aditya Akella, Michael M. Swift . On the Impact of Cluster Configuration on RoCE Application Design. APNet, 2019. Best Paper Award!

PDF Slides

Mojtaba Malekpourshahraki, Brent Stephens, Balajee Vamanan . Ether: Providing both Interactive Service and Fairness in Multi-Tenant Datacenters. APNet, 2019.

PDF Slides

Brent Stephens, Aditya Akella, Michael M. Swift . Loom: Flexible and Efficient NIC Packet Scheduling. NSDI, 2019.

PDF Slides

Brent Stephens, Aditya Akella, Michael M. Swift . Your Programmable NIC Should be a Programmable Switch. HotNets, 2018.

PDF Slides

Yanfang Le, Brent Stephens, Arjun Singhvi, Aditya Akella, Michael M. Swift . RoGUE: RDMA over Generic Unconverged Ethernet. SoCC, 2018.

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Keqiang He, Weite Qin, Qiwei Zhang, Wenfei Wu, Junjie Yang, Tian Pan, Chengchen Hu, Jiao Zhang, Brent Stephens, Aditya Akella, Ying Zhang . Low Latency Software Rate Limiters for Cloud Networks. APNET, 2017.

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Brent Stephens, Arjun Singhvi, Aditya Akella, Michael Swift . Titan: Fair Packet Scheduling for Commodity Multiqueue NICs. Usenix ATC, 2017.

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Brent Stephens, Alan L. Cox . Deadlock-Free Local Fast Failover for Arbitrary Data Center Networks. Infocom, 2016.

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Brent Stephens, Alan L. Cox, Scott Rixner . Scalable Multi-Failure Fast Failover via Forwarding Table Compression. SOSR, 2016.

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Brent Stephens . Handling Congestion and Routing Failures in Data Center Networking. PhD Thesis, 2015.

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Jeff Rasley, Brent Stephens, Colin Dixon, Eric Rozner, Wes Felter, Kanak Agarwal, John Carter, Rodrigo Fonseca . Planck: Millisecond-scale Monitoring and Control for Commodity Networks. SIGCOMM, 2014.

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Brent Stephens, Ankit Singla, Colin Dixon, Wes Felter, John Carter, Alan L. Cox . Practical DCB for Improved Data Center Networks. Infocom, 2014.

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Jeff Rasley, Brent Stephens, Colin Dixon, Eric Rozner, Wes Felter, Kanak Agarwal, John Carter, Rodrigo Fonseca . Low-latency Network Monitoring via Oversubscribed Port Mirroring. ONS, 2014.

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Brent Stephens, Alan L. Cox, Scott Rixner . Plinko: Building Provably Resilient Forwarding Tables. HotNets, 2013.

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Brent Stephens, Alan L. Cox, Wes Felter, Colin Dixon, John Carter . PAST: Scalable Ethernet for Data Centers. CoNEXT, 2012.

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Brent Stephens, Alan L. Cox, Scott Rixner, T. S. Eugene Ng . A Scalability Study of Enterprise Network Architectures. ANCS, 2011.

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Jeffery Shafer, Brent Stephens, Michael Foss, Scott Rixner, Alan L. Cox . Axon: A Flexible Substrate for Source-routed Ethernet. ANCS, 2010.

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Photos of Brent

Teaching

I was involved with teaching the following courses at UIC:

Students

I am currently advising the following students:

Past students:

Professional Activities

Program committees:

  • NSDI 2023, NSDI 2022, SIGCOMM 2021, CoNEXT 2021, ANCS 2021, SOSR 2021, SOSR 2020, ANCS 2019, APNet 2018, Usenix ATC 2018

NSF Panels:

  • One panel in 2021, one panel in 2019, one panel in 2016, and one panel in 2015

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