Abstract: The end of Dennard Scaling and Moore’s Law opened up the era of multicores and accelerators. In this era of Artificial General Intelligence, applications after applications are crunching more numbers than ever before and clamoring for more computing cycles in CPUs, GPUs, APUs, etc. SmartNICs are a form of an accelerator for network processing. Along with other XPUs they are evolving fast, accommodating FPGA and ASIC technologies. In this panel, we review recent advances and research challenges in SmartNICs and discuss their implications and impacts of adoption in datacenters.

Moderator: Prof. Sue Moon, KAIST, Korea

Sue Moon received her B.S. and M.S. from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, in 1988 and 1990, respectively, all in computer engineering. She received Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2000. From 1999 to 2003, she worked in the IPMON project at Sprint ATL in Burlingame, California. In August of 2003, she joined KAIST and now teaches in Daejeon, Korea. Her recent research interests lie in high- speed networking. She has served in numerous technical committees of prestigious conferences and served as chairs for WWW 2013 and ACM CoNEXT 2017, just to name a few. She was named a N2Women Star in Computer Networking and Communications by IEEE ComSoc in 2021. Her Best Paper of ACM IMC 2007 won the Test of Time Award in 2022. In 2021 she served as a deliberative member in the Presidential Advisory Council on Science and Technology in 2021 and currently sits on the board for KB Kookmin Bank.

Panelists: 

• Jeehoon Kang (KAIST)

Prof. Jeehoon Kang is an Associate Professor at the KAIST School of Computing and the Principal Investigator at the Concurrency and Parallelism Laboratory. He also serves as Adjunct Faculty at the Graduate School of AI Semiconductor, the Department of Semiconductor System Engineering, and the Graduate School of Quantum Science And Technology. Prof. Kang earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering in 2019 from Seoul National University and his advisors were Prof. Chung-Kil Hur and Prof. Kwangkeun Yi. His dissertation, "Reconciling Low-Level Features of C with Compiler Optimizations," established a groundbreaking framework for balancing low-level features in system programming with advanced compiler optimizations.
Since September 2017, Prof. Kang has served as the Chief R&D Officer at FuriosaAI, leading the development of deep learning accelerators and their compilers. His research focuses on designing and verifying concurrent and parallel systems, with the aim of enhancing performance and reducing power consumption across a variety of computing architectures, from micro-architectures to programming languages and algorithms.
Prof. Kang has made significant contributions to several influential open-source projects, including Crossbeam, a concurrency library in Rust; Crellvm, a verified credible compilation framework for LLVM; and SepCompCert, which focuses on the verification of separate compilation in CompCert. He is an active member of the program committees for major conferences, such as POPL and PLDI, and has held leadership roles such as Chair for the ACM SRC at APSEC in 2023 and Co-Chair for the POPL Student Research Competition in 2022.
His scholarly work has been recognized with several prestigious awards, including the Distinguished Paper Award at the ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages in 2022, and a Distinguished Paper Award at the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation in 2017.

• Gwangsun Kim (POSTECH)

Prof. Gwangsun Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at POSTECH. He completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at KAIST in 2016 under the guidance of Prof. John Kim, focusing on high-throughput system design with memory networks. Prior to joining POSTECH, Prof. Kim worked at ARM Inc. as a Senior Performance Engineer and Senior Research Engineer.
Prof. Kim’s research centers on advancing computing technology through innovative computer architecture and software optimizations. His work spans high-performance server systems to low-power edge devices, with specific projects on large language models like GPT, near-data processing in multi-GPU systems, and architectures for scalable neural processing units (NPUs).

• Gyuyeong Kim (Sungshin University)

Prof. Gyuyeong Kim is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Sungshin Women's University, where he specializes in computer networking and systems. His research primarily focuses on building high-performance and sustainable networked systems. Prof. Kim received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Korea University in 2020, advised by Prof. Wonjun Lee. 
His PhD thesis, "Buffer Sharing Mechanisms for Data Center Networks," addresses critical challenges in network buffer management and aiming to enhance performance and isolation in data center environments. He also developed KLUE, a widely-used lecture evaluation service at Korea University, demonstrating his commitment to improving educational tools.
Prof. Kim is actively involved in the academic community, contributing as a reviewer for prestigious IEEE journals, including IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, and IEEE Internet of Things Journal. He also serves on the technical program committees for high-profile conferences such as USENIX NSDI and IEEE MASS, playing a pivotal role in shaping research directions within his field.

• Eunyoung Jeong (Alpaca Networks)

​​​​​​​Eunyoung Jeong is the CEO and founder of Alpaca Networks, a cutting-edge cybersecurity deep-tech startup established in July 2022. Alpaca Networks specializes in the Alpaca Infra Platform (AIP), which offers optimized DevOps solutions for managing and accessing servers in both cloud and on-premises environments.
In 2014, he earned a Ph.D. degree from KAIST with a thesis, "Design and Implementation of Highly Scalable User-level TCP Stack for Multicore Systems," under the guidance of Prof. Kyoungsoo Park. Under his leadership, Alpaca Networks has reached significant early milestones, including securing seed funding from KAIST Young Entrepreneurs' Investment Holding in 2023, winning the Excellent Patent Award of South Korea in the first half of the same year, and receiving the Outstanding Investment Pitch Award at the Seoul Startup Incubator Investment Bridge.
​​​​​​​The company's flagship product, Alpacon, seamlessly integrates access proxies and reverse connection-based server access protocols with user-friendly server control agents, enabling secure and efficient server infrastructure management. This comprehensive solution boosts both security and productivity by employing a zero-trust based permission model and incorporating various advanced technologies. This innovative approach has effectively addressed the traditional trade-offs between security and operational efficiency.

Abstract: By bringing together distinguished representatives from diverse funding agencies, this panel aims to shed light on the international funding opportunities available for research across disciplines, from fundamental sciences to applied research in technology. Topics will include navigating the landscape of the global research funding environment, strategies for building international partnerships and research initiatives, and understanding the criteria for successful applications. Attendees will leave with a deeper understanding of how to leverage international research grant opportunities, and successfully navigate partnerships and collaborative projects to advance their research goals and contribute to the global body of knowledge.

Panelists: 

• Dr. Deep Medhi (US National Science Foundation, NSF)
• Dr. Mamadou H. Diallo (US Office of Naval Research Global, ONRG)
• Dr. Juhee Ki (Global Cooperation, Institute of Information & Communications Technology Planning & Evaluation, IITP))

Thursday, May 9th 2024