About Me
I am an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Brown University. My research interests include solving practical networking and systems problems, with a focus on Software Defined Networking, data centers, clouds, and configuration management. In the past, I've conducted large scale measurement studies of data centers and enterprise networks; and I've developed several networked and distributed systems -- one of which was purchased in 2012.
News
| Sep 2020 | Our work on understanding Mobile Web Browsing Under Memory Pressure, accepted to CCR'20's Oct Issue. | |
| Aug 2020 | Our work on Solver-Aided Multi-Party configuration of microservices, Muppet, accepted to HotNets'20. | |
| Aug 2020 | Our work on extending tracing to P4, FoxHound, wins Student Research Competition. | |
| July 2020 | Running a joint US-Japan workshop on programmable data planes. Please summit an abstract here!. | |
| May 2020 | Our work on zero downtime updates to Facebook's CDNs accepted to SIGCOMM'20. | |
| Apr 2020 | Our work on fingerprinting CDNs, Inspector Gadget, accepted to TMA'20. | |
| May 2020 | Journal paper on validating MUD profiles for IoT Security accepted to TDSC. | |
| Feb 2020 | Hosting a visiting scholar from Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) to explore the role of programmable data planes in debugging microservices. | |
| Jan 2020 | Hosting a visiting scholar from FORTH Crete to revisit the role of IXPs in DDoS prevention. | |
| Dec 2019 | Teaching a new seminar on Practical Distributed Systems: Microservice Management. | |
| Dec 2019 | P4-InTel awarded best paper at CoNEXT ENCP Workshop. | |
| Nov 2019 | Excited to chair the Programmable Data Plane Session at HotNets. | |
| Nov 2019 | Program Committee for NSDI 2021! Please submit. | |
| Oct 2019 | Dagstuhl report from our seminar on Programmable Data Planes is publically released. | |
| Oct 2019 | Our work on extending distributed tracing into the network with P4-InTel accepted at CoNEXT ENCP Workshop. | |
| Oct 2019 | Judged ACM SRC Poster Competition at MobiCOM. | |
| Oct 2019 | Excited to give an Invited Talk at Tufts CS (my alma mater). |
Research
- Democratizing Mobile Web Performance
- Data-driven Protocol Optimizations [ConfigTron, HotCloud'17] [YVideo, IMC'16] [ZeroDownTimeUpdates, SIGCOMM'20]
- Understanding Web Performance in Developing Regions [MobilePerfInPakistan]
- Quantifying Configuration Heterogenity [InspectorGadget-HTTP] [InspectorGadget-TCP]
- Highly Available Next Generation Networks
- Fault Tolerant SDNs: [LegoSDN, SoSR'16] [Chopin, APNet'17] [Mozart, SoCC'19]
- Debugging and Diagnosis [P4-InTel, CoNEXT ECNP'19] [P4Visor, CoNEXT'18] [Dapper, SoSR'17] [Armageddon, HotNets'15] [YTrace, arXiv] [Yahoo Data Centers, arXiv]
- Dependable Hardware [SCC, EuroSYS'19] [Hermes, CoNEXT'17] [ Mecury, SoSR'17] [ SwitchVisor, CAN'17]
- Self Managing Networks: Machine Learning and Networks
- Self Configuring Data Centers [DeepConfig, NetAI] [DeepConfig, NeurIPS MLSYS]
- IoT Security [ IoT MUD, SoSR'19] [ IoT Vision, IoTSP'17] [Pot2DPI, CoNEXT CAN'17]
Software and Datasets
- Data Center Characteristics [IMC'2010]: data set
- LegoSDN (Fault Tolerant Controller) [SoSR'16]: source code
- Dapper (Data Plane diagnosis of TCP) [SoSR'17]: source code
- P4Visor [CoNEXT'18]: source code
- Hermes [CoNext'17]: Coming soon!
Funding: Grants & Gifts
- Google Faculty Research Awards, 2018 - 2019.
- NeTS: Small: Data Driven Mobile Web Performance., 2018 - 2022.
- NeTS: Small: Network-centric IoT Security., 2018 - 2023.
- NSF CAREER: Bug Tolerant Networking: Enabling Highly-Available Network Infrastructures through Semantic Transformations., 2018 - 2023.
- Democratizing Web Performance: Principled Measurements and Optimizations for Performance in Developing Regions, 2018 - 2019.
- NSF Medium:Towards Finer-Grained Cloud Computing., 2014 - 2019.
- Facebook Faculty Award, 2015, 2016.
- Google Cloud Resource Usage Grant, 2015.
- Yahoo! FREP, 2014, 2015.
- Yahoo! ACE, 2014.
- 2014 Equipment Gift from Yahoo, 300 servers.
- Facebook Gift, 2014-2016.
- Duke Bass Connections, 2014.
Selected publications (full list)
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Zero Downtime Release: Disruption-free Load Balancing of a Multi-Billion User Website. Usama Naseer, Luca Niccolini, Udip Pant, Alan Frindell, Ranjeeth Dasineni,Theophilus Benson [Proceedings of SIGCOMM, New York, New York, Aug 2020]
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In-Network Compute: Considered Armed and Dangerous. Theophilus Benson [Proceedings of HotOS, Bertinoro, Italy, May 2019]
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Efficient and Safe Network Updates with Suffix Causal Consistency. Sheng Liu, Theophilus Benson, and Michael Reiter [Proceedings of EUROSYS, Dresden, Germany, Mar 2019]
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P4Visor: Lightweight Virtualization and Composition Primitives for Building and Testing Modular Programs. Peng Zheng, Theophilus Benson, and Chengchen Hu [Proceedings of CoNEXT, Crete, Greece, Dec 2018] [A workshop version appeared in CoNEXT 2018.]
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Performance Characterization of a Commercial Video Streaming Service. Mojgan Ghasemi, Partha Kanuparthy, Ahmed Mansy, Theophilus Benson and Jennifer Rexford. [Proceedings of IMC, Santa Monica, CA, Nov 2016]
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Tolerating SDN Application Failures with LegoSDN. Balakrishnan Chandrasekaran, Brendan Tschaen, and Theophilus Benson. [Proceedings of SoSR, California, US, Mar 2016] [A workshop version appeared in HotNets 2014.]
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Best Paper Downloads: PDF |
Network Traffic Characteristics of Data Centers in the Wild. Theophilus Benson, Aditya Akella and David Maltz [Proceedings of IMC, Melbourne, Australia, Nov 2010]
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