Oyekunle Olukotun
Stanford University, CA·Computer Science
Cloud data centers struggle to keep up with demanding applications such as social media, video streaming and artificial intelligence. One reason is that computing happens only on servers, while the network that links them merely passes data packets along.
- Fields
Computer Science
Engineering
- Topics
in-network computing
stateful switches
programmable switches
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Sep 2026
What they work on
- Design a stateful network switch architecture that can store, compute on and share application data inside the network, beyond basic packet routing.
- Build a network-wide programming abstraction and runtime that lets many stateful switches across a data center be programmed and operated together.
- Develop a suite of distributed and high-performance computing applications and test cases to explore design trade-offs in stateful switches.
More about the research
In-network computing speeds things up by doing part of the computation inside network switches, the devices that direct traffic. Today's switches, however, are stateless: they handle each packet on its own and cannot keep track of the data, or "state", that distributed applications need.
Why it matters
Large-scale computing is used by researchers, government and businesses in every sector. Data centers that compute inside the network could scale and speed up these growing workloads, including AI and data-intensive services. This could make large computing jobs faster and more efficient.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Minlan Yu
Harvard University, MA·Computer Science
Design a stateful network switch architecture that can manage, compute on and share application state inside the network, enabling in-network computing for distributed and high-performance computing applications.
Reza Rejaie
University of Oregon, OR·Computer Science
Design a multi-objective, approximation-based scheme that schedules monitoring queries on a single multi-stage programmable switch, balancing accuracy, latency and reporting load.
Arvind Krishnamurthy
University of Washington, WA·Computer Science
Design NetFusion, a rack-level pool of programmable network interface cards (SmartNICs) that perform packet and network-function processing for many servers, with safe and fair sharing among applications.
The school
Stanford University: 87 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 739 research doctorates a year.
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