Networking is fundamental to the large-scale, distributed systems that power the family of Facebook applications that are used by billions of people. To foster further innovation in networking and to deepen our collaboration with academia, Facebook launched the 2020 Networking request for proposals (RFP) in March. Today, we’re announcing the recipients of these research awards.

This RFP was the latest iteration of the 2019 Networking Systems RFP, which focused on improving network efficiency with intelligent control and programmable switches and their applications. This year, we asked for proposals in the areas of host networking and transport security.

“This year’s submissions continue to reflect the quality and breadth of research topics in academia, and at the same time, their relevance to addressing Facebook’s growing networking infrastructure needs was indeed impressive,” says Rajiv Krishnamurthy, Software Engineering Director at Facebook. “I look forward to continuing our close collaboration with academia to solve interesting technical challenges as we build a more social network.”

We received 67 proposals from 15 countries and 57 universities. Thank you to everyone who took the time to submit a proposal, and congratulations to the winners. All winners are invited to the annual Networking and Communications Faculty Summit in 2021.

Research award recipients

A custom NIC and network stack to support parallel network fabrics
George Porter, Aaron Schulman, and Alex C. Snoeren (University of California, San Diego)

Automated cross-validation of TLS 1.3 implementations
Erez Zadok, Amir Rahmati, and Scott A. Smolka (Stony Brook University)

Automatic optimization of software network data planes
Gianni Antichi (Queen Mary University of London), Gabor Retvari (Budapest University of Technology and Economics), and Sebastiano Miano (Queen Mary University of London)

Flexible, practical, and end-to-end scheduling for networked applications
Christos Kozyrakis and Kostis Kaffes (Stanford University)

Host networking for application-oriented congestion control
Michael Schapira (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Philip Brighten Godfrey (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), and Yedid Hoshen (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

Taming datacenter micro-bursts at hosts
Soudeh Ghorbani (Johns Hopkins University)