Publications

2025

1. SIGCOMM

   CEIO: A Cache-Efficient Network I/O Architecture for NIC-CPU Data Paths

   Bowen Liu^* , Xinyang Huang^* , Qijing Li, Zhuobin Huang, Yijun Sun, Wenxue Li, Junxue Zhang, Ping Yin, and Kai Chen

   In 39th ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM’25) , 2025

   Abs

   Efficient Input/Output (I/O) data path between NICs and CPUs/DRAMs is critical for supporting datacenter applications with high-performance network transmission, especially as link speed scales to 100Gbps and beyond. Traditional I/O acceleration strategies, such as Data Direct I/O (DDIO) and Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), perform suboptimally due to the inefficient utilization of the Last-Level Cache (LLC). This paper presents CEIO, a novel cache-efficient network I/O architecture that employs proactive rate control and elastic buffering to achieve zero LLC misses in the I/O data path while ensuring the effectiveness of DDIO and RDMA under various network conditions. We have implemented CEIO on commodity SmartNICs and incorporated it into widely-used DPDK and RDMA libraries. Experiments with well-optimized RPC framework and distributed file system under realistic workloads demonstrate that CEIO achieves up to 2.9x higher throughput and 1.9x lower P99.9 latency over prior work.

2. SIGCOMM

   Revisiting RDMA Reliability for Lossy Fabrics

   Wenxue Li , Xiangzhou Liu , Yunxuan Zhang , Zihao Wang, Wei Gu , Gaoxiong Zeng , Shoushou Ren , Xinyang Huang, Zhenghang Ren, Bowen Liu, Junxue Zhang, and Kai Chen

   In 39th ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM’25) , 2025
3. arXiv

   Swift: Rethinking RDMA Control Plane for Elastic Computing

   Junxue Zhang, Han Tian , Xinyang Huang, Wenxue Li, Kaiqiang Xu, Dian Shen , Yong Wang, and Kai Chen

   arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.19051, 2025

   PDF
4. APNet

   Cache-Aware I/O Rate Control for RDMA

   Qijing Li , Xinyang Huang, Bowen Liu , Pengbo Li, Junxue Zhang, and Kai Chen

   In 9th Asia-Pacific Workshop on Networking (APNet’25) , 2025

   Abs

   Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) has become a cornerstone technology in modern datacenter networks due to its high throughput and extremely low latency. However, recent works have revealed that congestion arises in the "last mile" of the RDMA I/O path—–between DRAM and CPU registers–—due to inefficiencies in the memory hierarchy, where severe cache misses and memory bandwidth contention degrade performance. We identify the root cause of this I/O congestion as the speed mismatch between network ingress and CPU processing, which leads to data accumulation and, eventually, Last-Level Cache (LLC) overflow. To address this issue, we propose RhyR, a credit-based rate control mechanism that dynamically aligns network ingress speed with CPU processing speed. Our preliminary evaluation on eRPC over RDMA, a widely used RPC framework, demonstrates that RhyR effectively mitigates I/O congestion, reducing tail latency by up to 1.40x and improving throughput by up to 1.35x compared to prior work.

5. OSDI

   Enabling Efficient GPU Communication over Multiple NICs with FuseLink

   Zhenghang Ren , Yuxuan Li , Zilong Wang , Xinyang Huang, Wenxue Li, Kaiqiang Xu, Xudong Liao, Yijun Sun, Bowen Liu, Han Tian, Junxue Zhang , Mingfei Wang, Zhizhen Zhong , Guyue Liu , Ying Zhang, and Kai Chen

   In Proceedings of the 19th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI’25) , 2025

   Abs Code

   Machine learning (ML) clusters stack multiple network interface cards (NICs) within each server to improve GPU communication bandwidth. However, existing systems fall short in fully utilizing NICs because of statically binding GPU traffic to NICs and PCIe bottleneck. This leads to suboptimal performance under imbalanced traffic, such as when GPUs process different LLM serving requests and training models with varying communication pattern. We propose FuseLink to enable efficient GPU communication over multiple NICs. FuseLink extends inter-server network by integrating high-speed intra-server connections, and recognizes GPUs to efficiently relay traffic to idle NICs. We implement FuseLink and integrate it into NCCL, so that ML applications can use FuseLink seamlessly without code modifications. Compared to NCCL with PXN, we verify that FuseLink can achieve 212GBps bandwidth between two inter-server GPUs and bring speedup on producing the first token in LLM model serving by 1.06-2.89, mixture-of-expert (MoE) training by up to 1.3x, and recommendation model training by up to 1.2x.

6. INFOCOM

   A Generic and Efficient Communication Framework for Message-level In-Network Computing

   Xinchen Wan , Luyang Li, Han Tian, Xudong Liao , Xinyang Huang, Chaoliang Zeng , Zilong Wang, Xinyu Yang, Ke Cheng, Qingsong Ning , Guyue Liu, Layong Luo, and Kai Chen

   In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM’25) , 2025

   PDF

2024

1. EuroSys

   Accelerating privacy-preserving machine learning with GeniBatch

   Xinyang Huang, Junxue Zhang, Xiaodian Cheng , Hong Zhang, Yilun Jin, Shuihai Hu, Han Tian, and Kai Chen

   In Proceedings of the Nineteenth European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys’24) , 2024

   Abs PDF Code

   Cross-silo privacy-preserving machine learning (PPML) adopts Partial Homomorphic Encryption (PHE) for secure data combination and high-quality model training across multiple organizations (e.g., medical and financial). However, PHE introduces significant computation and communication overheads due to data inflation. Batch optimization is an encouraging direction to mitigate the problem by compressing multiple data into a single ciphertext. While promising, it is impractical for a large number of cross-silo PPML applications due to the limited vector operations support and severe data corruption. In this paper, we present GeniBatch, a batch compiler that translates a PPML program with PHE into an efficient program with batch optimization. GeniBatch adopts a set of conversion rules to allow PHE programs involving all vector operations required in cross-silo PPML and ensures end-to-end result consistency before/after compiling. By proposing bit-reserving algorithms, GeniBatch avoids bit-overflow for the correctness of compiled programs and maximizes the compression ratio. We have integrated GeniBatch into FATE, a representative cross-silo PPML framework, and provided SIMD APIs to harness hardware acceleration. Experiments across six popular applications show that GeniBatch achieves up to 22.6x speedup and reduces network traffic by 5.4x-23.8x for generic cross-silo PPML applications.