About Me
I recently completed my PhD at Stanford University advised by Professor Nick McKeown and am currently a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford. Prior to my PhD, I received my bachelors degree in Engineering from Harvey Mudd College.
I am passionate about building high performance network systems by leveraging hardware/software co-design. I am currently working on the nanoPU, a novel CPU-NIC architecture designed to provide ultra low latency and high throughput. The nanoPU moves the entire network stack into line-rate hardware: programmable transport, core selection, and thread scheduling. It uses a novel register file network interface rather than the traditional DMA-based network interface in order to provide the lowest possible latency and most predictable performance. We developed an open source, end-to-end FPGA prototype that runs on AWS F1 instances using Firesim. The wire-to-wire latency through the nanoPU is just 69ns – an order of magnitude lower latency than state-of-the-art commercial NICs! The nanoPU also enables single-digit microsecond 99% tail latencies and message processing throughput of over 100 Mrps per-core. You can learn more about the nanoPU from our paper and this 30min talk.
Research Interests
- Network Systems
- Computer Architecture
- Distributed Applications
- Domain Specific Hardware/Software Co-Design
Education
- Ph.D. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering, 2021 — Stanford University
- B.S. in Engineering, 2015 — Harvey Mudd College
Publications
The nanoPU: Redesigning the CPU-Network Interface to Minimize RPC Tail Latency
Stephen Ibanez, Alex Mallery, Serhat Arslan, Theo Jepsen, Muhammad Shahbaz, Nick McKeown, and Changhoon Kim
To appear in USENIX OSDI 21
Open source artifact
30min Talk Recording
Zerializer: Towards Zero-Copy Serialization
Adam Wolnikowski, Stephen Ibanez, Jonathan Stone, Changhoon Kim, Rajit Manohar, Robert Soule
To appear in HotOS 2021
The Case for a Network Fast Path to the CPU
Stephen Ibanez, Muhammad Shahbaz, and Nick McKeown
HotNets 2019
Event-Driven Packet Processing
Stephen Ibanez, Gianni Antichi, Gordon Brebner, and Nick McKeown
HotNets 2019
Open source artifact
The P4-NetFPGA workflow for line-rate packet processing
Stephen Ibanez, Gordon Brebner, Nick McKeown, and Noa Zilberman
FPGA 2019
Open source artifact
s-PERC: A distributed algorithm to calculate max-min fair rates without per-flow state
Lavanya Jose, Stephen Ibanez, Mohammad Alizadeh, and Nick McKeown
SIGMETRICS 2019
Open source artifact
Teaching Experience
CS344: Build an Internet Router, Stanford University
- Spring 2018, Spring 2019
P4 Language Tutorial Instructor
- P4 Developer Day, Spring 2019
- SIGCOMM, 2019
- FPGA Conference, 2018
- P4 Developer Day, Spring 2018
- East Coast P4 Developer Day, 2018
- P4 Developer Day, Fall 2017
P4-NetFPGA Tutorial Instructor
- FPGA Conference, 2019
- SIGCOMM, 2017
- NetFPGA Summer Camp, University of Cambridge, 2017
- P4 Developer Day, Spring 2017