I’m happy to share the exciting news that my project for the Incentive Grant for Scientific research (MIS) from our national fund for 470K€ (one PhD, one post-doc and equipment) was accepted, while a PhD student of our team, Clément Delzotti got his 4-year PhD funded by FNRS FRIA too!
The MIS project “DHNET: The Disaggregated Host Networking paradigm to enable particle-to-particle streams” is a more fundamental project looking beyond the current design of the Internet, to enable more efficient communications. The Internet is built around the idea monolithic computers are communicating. Each computer gets an address, and communicate together as a whole. As physician refined the model of atoms in particles, the Internet needs to be redesigned to look inside computers. Components, particles, like GPU, CPU caches, TPUs, network interfaces need to communicate directly together as computers are not monolithic devices anymore, but an interconnect of many components and memory domains. Why would a transfer, say a picture generated by a cloud gaming GPU go through a CPU, a proxy, a load balancer while it could be sent through a direct path to the consumer’s screen? In practice we will use the newfound programmability of networks with programmable switches and SmartNICs to direct the data to the right particle.
The FRIA grant obtained by Clément Delzotti builds upon data acquired at the lab showing network I/O intensive application can sustain a good quality of service while achieving a 8X energy reduction by spreading differently the traffic on multiple cores and tuning frequency appropriately. The project aims at building an energy-aware data center load-balancer to reduce energy waste.
Therefore, expect a new PhD and post-doc position to open soon! The post-doc one is already open, just consider it can be extended 😉