Welcome to the Berkeley NetSys Lab

Active Projects

Programmable RDMA

We propose extensions to RDMA called Remote Memory Calls (RMCs) that allows applications to install a customized set of 1-sided RDMA operations. We are exploring how can RMCs be implemented on the forthcoming generation of SmartNICs, and we will compare its performance to pure 1-sided and 2-sided RDMA operations.

CESSNA

The introduction of computational resources at the network edge allows application designers to offload computation from clients and/or servers. We propose a design called the Client-Edge-Server for Stateful Network Applications (CESSNA) for client-edge-server systems so they can tolerate edge failures and client mobility.

CellBricks

We propose CellBricks, a novel cellular architecture that lowers the barrier to entry for new operators by enabling users to consume access on-demand from any available cellular operator — small or large, trusted or untrusted.

Efficient Work Stealing

Existing techniques such as work stealing perform well for long tasks, but can be inefficient for short tasks that take only a couple of microseconds. We explore techniques to perform load balancing more efficiently, so that requests are handled faster and cores waste fewer cycles looking for work.

Blockaid

Several recent laws (e.g., GDPR and CCPA) constrain how applications collect and utilize user data, and ensuring compliance to these constraints is challenging. Blockaid is a system that enforces data access policies for web applications using a proxy that interposes on the connection between the application and the database.

RCS

The conventional wisdom requires that all congestion control algorithms deployed on the public Internet be TCP-friendly. We propose an alternative to the TCP-friendly paradigm that can accommodate innovation, is consistent with the Internet’s current economic model, and is feasible to deploy given current usage trends.

Persimmon

Distributed in-memory storage systems lose all state on failure, so recovery is expensive and data loss is always a risk. The Persimmon system leverages persistent memory (PM) to convert existing in-memory storage systems into persistent, crash-consistent versions with low overhead and minimal code changes.

Routing Resilience

A project in this area attempts to deliver a routing resiliency mechanism that is easily implementable, easily deployable, and easily manageable while offering packet delivery rates that rival those of the most sophisticated resiliency mechanisms.

Smarter Prefetching

We propose a smart memory prefetcher to exploit the predictability of memory access patterns in data oblivious algorithms to reduce their memory footprint, while limiting their performance degradation. It can use information garnered from one execution to accurately prefetch on subsequent executions of an application.