Biography

I am a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at Duke University, advised by Prof. Danyang Zhuo. Before Duke, I received my bachelor’s degree from Peking University. I am also fortunate to work with other excellent researchers and engineers, including Wei Bai, Mahmoud Elhaddad, and Shachar Raindel when I intern at Microsoft. I also worked closely with Yibo Zhu and Chuanxiong Guo when I was in ByteDance.

Research

As a member of Duke Systems Group, my research interests include cloud computing and datacenter networks, with a focus on kernel bypass networking and hardware acceleration. Specifically, I lead the project of HostBench, a test framework for RDMA software/hardware stack. The ambition of this project is to assist cloud providers and hardware vendors in building more reliable, efficient, and secure next generations of kernel bypass networks. Our current publications/projects, Husky (NSDI ‘23) and Collie (NSDI ‘22), are part of this initiative. We have already seen real-world impact from our work, as vendors have released new CVEs and firmware upgrades in response to the issues we identified. We are now working on generalizing this framework to other kernel bypass network solutions and diverse types of heterogeneous hardware.

News

April 2023 - Our Intra-Host Network paper gets accepted by HotOS 2023

May 2023 - I will re-join @Microsoft Azure Host Networking as a research intern this summer. Let’s meet at the Puget Sound (again)!

April 2023 - I will present Husky on NSDI 2023. See you in Boston!

July 2022 - Our RDMA Performance Isolation paper gets accepted by NSDI 2023!

Publications (by date)

1. Towards a Manageable Intra-Host Network (HotOS 2023)

   Xinhao Kong, Jiaqi Lou, Wei Bai, Nam Sung Kim, Danyang Zhuo

2. Remote Procedure Call as a Managed System Service (NSDI 2023)

   Jingrong Chen*, Yongji Wu*, Shihan Lin, Yechen Xu, Xinhao Kong, Thomas Anderson, Matthew Lentz, Xiaowei Yang, Danyang Zhuo. (*equal contribution)

   [pdf] [code]

3. Understanding RDMA Microarchitecture Resources for Performance Isolation (NSDI 2023)

   Xinhao Kong, Jingrong Chen, Wei Bai, Yechen Xu, Mahmoud Elhaddad, Shachar Raindel, Jitendra Padhye, Alvin R. Lebeck, Danyang Zhuo.

   [pdf] [code]

4. Collie: Finding Performance Anomalies in RDMA Subsystems (NSDI 2022)

   Xinhao Kong, Yibo Zhu, Huaping Zhou, Zhuo Jiang, Jianxi Ye, Chuanxiong Guo, Danyang Zhuo.

   [pdf] [slides] [code] [video]

Invited Talks

• Collie: Finding Performance Anomalies in RDMA Subsystems

  Harvard Cloud & Network System Group

  May 2022, Virtual

• Finding Performance Anomalies in RDMA Subsystems

  Student Lightning Talk @Google Networking Research Summit 2022

  March 2022, Virtual

• Finding Performance Anomalies in RDMA Subsystems

  Microsoft Research and Microsoft Azure

  September 2021, Virtual

Teaching

• Spring 2023: Teaching Assistant for Distributed System (CompSci 512)

• Fall 2022: Teaching Assistant for Introduction to Operating Systems (CompSci 310)

Awards / Honors

• USENIX NSDI Student Grant, 2023
• Duke Computer Science PhD Fellowship, 2022-2023
• USENIX NSDI Student Grant, 2022
• Duke Computer Science PhD Fellowship, 2021-2022
• Peking University Outstanding Graduate Award, 2020