Xiangfeng Zhu
CSE 391, Paul G. Allen Center
xfzhu (at) cs (dot) washington (dot) edu
GitHub, Twitter, LinkedIn
Curriculum Vitae
Google Scholar, DBLP
About:
I'm a fourth year Ph.D. student at the Systems Lab and FOCI Center, University of Washington, advised by Arvind Krishnamurthy and Ratul Mahajan. I am also working closely with Danyang Zhuo.
Previously, I obtained my bachelor's degree (with honors) from University of Michigan, where I was advised by Mosharaf Chowdhury at the SymbioticLab. I also worked with Matthew Lentz, Harsha V. Madhyastha, Junchen Jiang, and Peter Alvaro.
My research interests are broadly in systems and networking. My recent works focus on microservices, service mesh, and application networking.
Currently, I lead the Application-Defined Networks project, aimed at building networks tailored to individual applications (microservices). Our vision is described in a paper presented at HotNets..
Publications:
Abstractions for Application Networks
Under Review. Draft available upon request. [website]
Application Defined Networks
Xiangfeng Zhu, Weixin Deng, Banruo Liu, Jingrong Chen, Yongji Wu, Thomas Anderson, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Ratul Mahajan, Danyang Zhuo
HotNets, 2023, [paper][talk][slide]
Dissecting Overheads of Service Mesh Sidecars
Xiangfeng Zhu, Guozhen She, Bowen Xue, Yu Zhang, Yongsu Zhang, Xuan Kelvin Zou, XiongChun Duan, Peng He, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Matthew Lentz, Danyang Zhuo, Ratul Mahajan
SoCC, 2023, [paper][slide][talk@Istio day]
FedScale: Benchmarking Model and System Performance of Federated Learning
Fan Lai, Yinwei Dai, Sanjay S. Singapuram, Jiachen Liu, Xiangfeng Zhu, Harsha V. Madhyastha, Mosharaf Chowdhury
Deployed at Linkedin Best Paper Award at SOSP ResilientFL '21
ICML, 2022, [paper][talk][website][media coverage]
Netherite: Efficient Execution of Serverless Workflows
Sebastian Burckhardt, Badrish Chandramouli, Chris Gillum, David Justo, Konstantinos Kallas, Connor McMahon, Christopher S. Meiklejohn, Xiangfeng Zhu
Deployed at Microsoft
VLDB, 2022, [paper][website][media coverage]
Oort: Efficient Federated Learning via Guided Participant Selection
Fan Lai, Xiangfeng Zhu, Harsha V. Madhyastha, Mosharaf Chowdhury
Adopted by Cisco Distinguished Artifact Award
USENIX OSDI, 2021, [paper][talk][slide][extended report][media coverage]
Sol: Fast Distributed Computation Over Slow Networks
Fan Lai, Jie You, Xiangfeng Zhu, Harsha V. Madhyastha, Mosharaf Chowdhury
USENIX NSDI, 2020, [paper][talk][slide][media coverage]
Fixed It For You: Protocol Repair Using Lineage Graphs
Lennart Oldenburg, Xiangfeng Zhu, Kamala Ramasubramanian, Peter Alvaro
CIDR, 2019, [paper][featured on "Morning Paper'']
Selected Talks:
- Application Defined Networks: FOCI Annual Symposium(Oct 2023), HotNets(Nov 2023)
- Dissecting Overheads of Service Mesh Sidecars: SoCC(Oct 2023), Istio Day(Nov 2023)
Blog:
I'm maintaining a personal blog about summaries of papers/blogs I read and a reading list on various topics in system and networking.
Work Experience:
Uber 
PhD Software Engineer Intern, Service Mesh Team June 2023 - Sep. 2023
VMware Research 
Research Intern, VMware Research Group June 2022 - Sep. 2022
Microsoft Research
Research Intern, RiSE GroupMay 2021 - Aug. 2021
Databricks
Software Engineer Intern, Serverless Team May 2020 - Aug. 2020
Dropbox
Software Engineer Intern, Filesystem Team May 2019 - Aug. 2019
Professional Activities:
- Program Committee: Istio Day 2024, NeurIPS(Datasets and Benchmarks Track) 2022, EuroSys 2022(Shadow PC), IMC 2022(Shadow PC)
- Student Volunteer: SoCC 2021, SIGCOMM 2021
- Artifact Evaluation Committee: SIGCOMM 2021, OSDI 2021, EuroSys 2021, JSys 2021
Teaching Experience:
- CSE 453/M553: Data Center Systems (with Simon Peter), Teaching Assistant, Fall 2022
- CSE 453/M553: Data Center Systems (with Simon Peter), Teaching Assistant, Fall 2023
Awards:
- ResilientFL Best Paper Award, 2021
- OSDI Distinguished Artifact Award, 2021
- Paul G. Allen First-Year Graduate Student Fellowship, 2021
Personal:
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My favorite sports are soccer, bouldering, and badminton. I am a fan of Barcelona and Manchester United.
Contact Me:
I'm pretty active online. The best ways to reach me are using one of the social media above, or sending me an email at xzhu0027 (at) gmail (dot) com or xfzhu (at) cs.washington (dot) edu