Home Page of M. Ghobadi

Manya Ghobadi

Email: ghobadi at csail dot mit dot edu

Office: 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, G940

Research Interests

Efficient Systems for Machine Learning

Large-Scale Reconfigurable Networks

High-Performance Cloud Infrastructure

Hardware-Software Co-design

Data Center Networks

Network Optimization

Optical Networks

Teaching

Fall 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019: 6.582 (6.829) Computer Networks

Spring 2024, 2023, 2020, 2019: 6.033 System Engineering

Spring 2021: 6.009 Fundamentals of Programming

Accessibility

Associate Professor
Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

CV

Bio

Manya Ghobadi is an associate professor in the EECS department at MIT. Her research spans different areas in computer networks, focusing on building efficient systems for machine learning and high-performance cloud infrastructure. Her work has been recognized by the Sloan Fellowship in Computer Science, ACM SIGCOMM Rising Star award, ACM-W Rising Star Award, NSF CAREER award, Optica Simmons Memorial Speakership award, best paper award at the Machine Learning Systems (MLSys) conference, as well as the best dataset, and best paper awards at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC). Manya received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and spent a few years at Microsoft Research and Google prior to joining MIT.

Publications

	Nona: Stochastic Congestion-Aware Job Scheduling for Real-Time Inference Queries B. Pit-Claudel, D. Malak, A. Cohen, M. Medard, M. Ghobadi IEEE CloudNet 2024 [paper]
	MLTCP: A Distributed Technique to Achieve Optimal Flow Scheduling For Machine Learning S. Rajasekaran, S. Narang, A. Zabreyko, M. Ghobadi ACM HotNets 2024 [paper]
	Cassini: Network-Aware Job Scheduling in Machine Learning Clusters S. Rajasekaran, M. Ghobadi, A. Akella USENIX NSDI 2024 [paper]
	Rail-only: A Low-Cost High-Performance Network for Training LLMs with Trillion Parameters W. Wang, M. Ghobadi, K. Shakeri, Y. Zhang, N. Hasani IEEE Hot Interconnects 2024 [paper]
	The Case for Decentralized Fallback Networks J. Lynch, Z. Liu, C. Li, M. Ghobadi, H. Balakrishnan ACM HotNets 2024 [to appear]
	NetBlocks: Staging Layouts for High-Performance Custom Host Network Stacks A. Brahmakshatriya, C. Rinard, M. Ghobadi, S. Amarasinghe ACM PLDI 2024 [paper]
	On-Fiber Photonic Computing M. Yang, Z. Zhong, M. Ghobadi ACM HotNets 2023 [paper]
	Lightning: A Reconfigurable Photonic-Electronic SmartNIC for Fast and Energy-Efficient Inference Z. Zhong, M. Yang, J. Lang, C. Williams, L. Kronman, A. Sludds, H. Esfahanizadeh, D. Englund, M. Ghobadi ACM SIGCOMM 2023 [paper]
	TopoOpt: Optimizing the Network Topology for Distributed DNN Training W. Wang, M. Khazraee, Z. Zhong, M. Ghobadi, Z. Jia, D. Mudigere, Y. Zhang, A. Kewitsch USENIX NSDI 2023 [paper][slides][demo][code][video]
	InfoShape: Task-Based Neural Data Shaping Via Mutual Information H. Esfahanizadeh, W. Wu, M. Ghobadi, R. Barzilay, M. Medard IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2023 [paper][slides]
	Emerging Optical Interconnects for AI Systems (Invited) (Optica Jane Simmons Speakership Award) M. Ghobadi OFC 2022 [paper]
	Delocalized Photonic Deep Learning on the Internet's Edge A. Sludds, S. Bandyopadhyay, Z. Chen, Z. Zhong, J. Cochrane, L. Bernstein, D. Bunandar, P. Ben Dixon, S. Hamilton, M. Streshinsky, A. Novack, T. Baehr-Jones, M. Hochberg, M. Ghobadi, R. Hamerly, D. Englund Science 2022, Vol. 378 (6617) [paper]
	Congestion Control in Machine Learning Clusters S. Rajasekaran, M. Ghobadi, G. Kumar, A. Akella ACM HotNets 2022 [paper]
	Using Trio -- Juniper Networks' Programmable Chipset -- for Emerging In-Network Applications M. Yang, A. Baban, V. Kugel, J. Libby, S. Mackie, S. S. R. Kananda, C. Wu, M. Ghobadi ACM SIGCOMM 2022 [paper][slides] News article: Building a Programmable Platform for Tomorrow's Applications
	ABM: Active Buffer Management in Datacenters V. Addanki, M. Apostolaki, M. Ghobadi, S. Schmid, L. Vanbever ACM SIGCOMM 2022 [paper][code]
	Demonstration of WDM-Enabled Ultralow-Energy Photonic Edge Computing A. Sludds, R. Hamerly, S. Bandyopadhyay, Z. Zhong, Z. Chen, L. Bernstein, M. Ghobadi, D. Englund OFC 2022 [paper]
	WDM-Enabled Photonic Edge Computing (Best Paper Award) A. Sludds, R. Hamerly, S. Bandyopadhyay, Z. Chen, Z. Zhong, L. Bernstein, M. Ghobadi, D. Englund OptoElectronics and Communications Conference (OECC) and International Conference on Photonics in Switching and Computing (PSC) 2022 [paper]
	Cerberus: The Power of Choices in Datacenter Topology Design (A Throughput Perspective) C. Griner, J. Zerwas, A. Blenk, S. Schmid, M. Ghobadi, and C. Avin ACM SIGMETRICS 2022 [paper]
	Performance Tradeoffs in Reconfigurable Networks for HPC M. Y. Teh, Z. Wu, M. Glick, S. Rumley, M. Ghobadi, K. Bergman Journal of Optical Communications and Networking, 2022 [paper]
	BOW: First Real-World Demonstration of a Bayesian Optimization System for Wavelength Reconfiguration (Postdeadline Paper) Z. Zhong, M. Ghobadi, M. Balandat, S. Katti, A. Kazerouni, J. Leach, M. McKillop, Y. Zhang OFC 2021 [paper] [slides] [code]
	ARROW: Restoration-Aware Traffic Engineering Z. Zhong, M. Ghobadi, A. Khaddaj, J. Leach, Y. Xia, Y. Zhang ACM SIGCOMM 2021 [paper][slides][code] News article: Who Can Bend Light for Cheaper Internet?
	SiP-ML: High-Bandwidth Optical Network Interconnects for Machine Learning Training M. Khani, M. Ghobadi, M. Alizadeh, Z. Zhu, M. Glick, K. Bergman, A. Vahdat, B. Klenk, E. Ebrahimi ACM SIGCOMM 2021 [paper][slides][code]
	IOI: In-Network Optical Inference Z. Zhong, W. Wang, M. Ghobadi, A. Sludds, R. Hamerly, L. Bernstein, D. Englund ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Workshop on Optical Systems (OptSys 2021) [paper][slides]
	In-network Aggregation for Shared Machine Learning Clusters (Best Paper Award) N. Gebara, P. Costa, M. Ghobadi MLSYS 2021 [paper] [slides]
	A Social Network Under Social Distancing: Risk-Driven Backbone Management During COVID-19 and Beyond Y. Xia, Y. Zhang, Z. Zhong, G. Yan, C. L. Lim, S. S. Ahuja, S. Bali, A. Nikolaidis, K. Ghobadi, M. Ghobadi USENIX NSDI 2021 [paper]
	NeuraCrypt: Hiding Private Health Data via Random Neural Networks for Public Training A. Yala, H. Esfahanizadeh, R. G. L. D'Oliveira, K. R. Duffy, M. Ghobadi, T. S. Jaakkola, V. Vaikuntanathan, R. Barzilay, M. Medard [paper][code]
	Challenging the Stateless Quo of Programmable Switches N. Gebara, A. Lerner, M. Yang, M. Yu, P. Costa, M. Ghobadi ACM HotNets 2020 [paper][slides]
	PINE: Photonic Integrated Networked Energy efficient datacenters (ENLITENED Program) [Invited] M. Glick, N. C. Abrams, Q. Cheng, M. Teh, Y. Hung, O. Jimenez, S. Liu, Y. Okawachi, X. Meng, L. Johansson, M. Ghobadi, L. Dennison, G. Michelogiannakis, J. Shalf, A. Liu, J. Bowers, A. Gaeta, M. Lipson, and K. Bergman Journal of Optical Communications and Networking, 2020 [paper]
	Photonic Memory Disaggregation in Datacenters J. Shalf, G. Michelogiannakis, B. Austin, T. Groves, M. Ghobadi, L. Dennison, T. Gray, M. Glick, K. Bergman OSA Advanced Photonics Congress 2020 [paper]
	On the Complexity of Traffic Traces and Implications C. Avin, M. Ghobadi, K. Griner, S. Schmid ACM SIGMETRICS 2020 [paper]
	Enabling Programmable Transport Protocols in High-Speed NICs M. T. Arashloo, A. Lavrov, M. Ghobadi, J. Rexford, D. Walker, D. Wentzlaff USENIX NSDI 2020 [paper]
	OptFlow: A Flow-based Abstraction for Programmable Topologies K. Foerster, L. Luo, M. Ghobadi ACM SOSR 2020 [paper]
	FAB: Toward Flow-aware Buffer Sharing on Programmable Switches M. Apostolaki, L. Vanbever, M. Ghobadi Buffer Sizing Workshop 2019 [paper] [slides]
	FlexEnt: Entropy Coding to Curb Stragglers in Large-Scale Distributed Machine Learning J. Salamy, A. Sharma, M. Ghobadi, M. Medard SOSP's AI Systems Workshop 2019 [paper] [poster]
	TeaVaR: Striking the Right Utilization-Availability Balance in WAN Traffic Engineering J. Bogle, N. Bhatia, M. Ghobadi, I. Menache, N. Bjorner, A. Valadarsky, M. Schapira ACM SIGCOMM 2019 [paper] [slides] [code] [live demo] [poster] News article: Wall Street Secrets Could Cut Cloud Costs
	Bandwidth Steering for HPC using Silicon Nanophotonics G. Michelogiannakis, Y. Shen, M. Y. Teh, X. Meng, B. Aivazi, T. Groves, J. Shalf, M. Glick, M. Ghobadi, L. Dennison, K. Bergman ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference 2019 [paper]
	RADWAN: Rate Adaptive Wide Area Network R. Singh, M. Ghobadi, K. Foerster, M. Filer, P. Gill ACM SIGCOMM 2018 [paper] [slides]
	Characterizing the Algorithmic Complexity of Reconfigurable Data Center Architectures K. Foerster, M. Ghobadi, S. Schmid ACM/IEEE ANCS 2018 [paper] [slides]
	Beyond SmartNICs: Towards a Fully Programmable Cloud A. Caulfield, P. Costa, M. Ghobadi IEEE High Performance Switching and Routing 2018 [paper]
	PINE: An Energy Efficient Flexibly Interconnected Photonic Data Center Architecture for Extreme Scalability K. Bergman, J. Shalf, G. Michelogiannakis, S. Rumley, L. Dennison, M. Ghobadi IEEE Optical Interconnects 2018 [paper]
	Understanding and Mitigating Packet Corruption in Data Center Networks D. Zhuo, M. Ghobadi, R. Mahajan, K. Foerster, A. Krishnamurthy, T. Anderson ACM SIGCOMM 2017 [paper][slides]
	RAIL: A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Links in Data Center Networks D. Zhuo, M. Ghobadi, R. Mahajan, A. Phanishayee, X. K. Zou, H. Guan, A. Krishnamurthy, T. Anderson USENIX NSDI 2017 [paper][slides][code]
	Run, Walk, Crawl: Towards Dynamic Link Capacities R. Singh, M. Ghobadi, K. Foerster, M. Filer, P. Gill ACM HotNets 2017 [paper][HotNets dialogue] [Press]
	HotCocoa: Hardware Congestion Control Abstractions M. T. Arashloo, M. Ghobadi, J. Rexford, D. Walker ACM HotNets 2017 [paper][code]
	Optical Layer Failures in a Large Backbone (Best dataset award) M. Ghobadi, R. Mahajan ACM IMC 2016 [paper][dataset]
	ProjecToR: Agile Reconfigurable Data Center Interconnect M. Ghobadi, R. Mahajan, A. Phanishayee, N. Devanur, J. Kulkarni, G. Ranade, P. Blanche, H. Rastegarfar, M. Glick, D. Kilper ACM SIGCOMM 2016 [paper] [slides.pdf][slides.pptx][Disco Ball tech. report]
	ECN or Delay: Lessons Learnt from Analysis of DCQCN and TIMELY (Best Paper Award Finalist) Y. Zhu, M. Ghobadi, V. Misra, J. Padhye ACM CoNEXT 2016 [paper][slides]
	Evaluation of Elastic Modulation Gains in Microsoft's Optical Backbone in North America M. Ghobadi, J. Gaudette, R. Mahajan, A. Phanishayee, B. Klinkers, D. Kilper Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC)'16 [paper][slides]
	Elastic Optical Networking in the Microsoft Cloud M. Filer, J. Gaudette, M. Ghobadi, R. Mahajan, T. Issenhuth, B. Klinkers, J. Cox Journal of Optical Communications and Networking (JOCN)'16 [paper][images/]
	TIMELY: RTT-based Congestion Control for the Datacenter R. Mittal, V. Lam, N. Dukkipati, E. Blem, H. Wassel, M. Ghobadi, A. Vahdat, Y. Wang, D. Wetherall, D. Zats ACM SIGCOMM 2015 [paper][public review][code]
	Efficient Traffic Splitting on Commodity Switches N. Kang, M. Ghobadi, J. Reumann, A. Shraer, J. Rexford ACM CoNEXT 2015 [paper][slides]
	TCP Pacing in Data Center Networks M. Ghobadi, Y. Ganjali IEEE Hot Interconnects 2013 [paper][slides]
	Trickle: Rate Limiting YouTube Video Streaming (Google Research Excellent Paper Award) M. Ghobadi, Y. Cheng, A. Jain, M. Mathis USENIX ATC 2012 [paper][slides] [demo]
	Rethinking End-to-End Congestion Control in Software-Defined Networks M. Ghobadi, S. Yeganeh, Y. Ganjali ACM HotNets 2012 [paper][slides]
	Caliper: Precise and Responsive Traffic Generator M. Ghobadi, G. Salmon, Y. Ganjali, M. Labrecque, G. Steffan IEEE Hot Interconnects 2012 [paper][slides][demo]
	Proportional Rate Reduction for TCP (Google Research Excellent Paper Award) N. Dukkipati, M. Mathis, Y. Cheng, M. Ghobadi ACM IMC 2011 [paper][RFC]
	OpenTM: Traffic Matrix Estimator for OpenFlow Networks A. Tootoonchian, M. Ghobadi, Y. Ganjali Passive and Active Measurement conference 2010 [paper]
	Emulation of Optical PIFO Buffers H. Rastegarfar, M. Ghobadi, Y. Ganjali IEEE GLOBECOM 2009 [paper]
	NetThreads: Programming NetFPGA with Threaded Software (2nd Place for Best Project Award) M. Labrecque, J. Steffan, G. Salmon, M. Ghobadi, Y. Ganjali NetFPGA Developers Workshop 2009 [paper][code]
	NetFPGA-based Precise Traffic Generation G. Salmon, M. Ghobadi, Y. Ganjali, M. Labrecque, J. Steffan NetFPGA Developers Workshop 2009 [paper][tech. report][code][documentation]
	Experimental study of router buffer sizing (Best Paper Award) N. Beheshti, Y. Ganjali, M. Ghobadi, N. McKeown, and G. Salmon ACM IMC 2008 [paper]
	Resource Optimization Algorithms for Virtual Private Networks Using the Hose Model M. Ghobadi, S. Ganti, G. C. Shoja Computer Networks Journal 2008 [paper]
	Performing Time-sensitive Network Experiments N. Beheshti, Y. Ganjali, M. Ghobadi, J. Naous, N. McKeown, and G. Salmon ANCS 2008 [paper]
	Hierarchical Provisioning Algorithm for Virtual Private Networks Using the Hose Model M. Ghobadi, S. Ganti, G. C. Shoja IEEE GLOBECOM 2007 [paper]
	Resource Optimization to Provision a Virtual Private Network Using the Hose Model M. Ghobadi, S. Ganti, G. C. Shoja IEEE ICC 2007 [paper]

Postdocs

Dr. Ankit Bhardwaj (Co-advised with Prof. Adam Belay)

Current Students

Mingran Yang (Ph.D. candidate)

Sudarsanan Rajasekaran (Ph.D. candidate)

Weiyang (Frank) Wang (Ph.D. candidate)

Benoit Pit--Claudel (Ph.D. candidate, co-advised with Prof. Muriel Medard)

Charlie Liu (Ph.D. candidate, co-advised with Prof. Hari Balakrishnan)

Anton Zabreyko (Ph.D. candidate)

Sanjoli Narang (Ph.D. candidate)

James Lynch (Ph.D. candidate, co-advised with Prof. Hari Balakrishnan)

Om Chabra (Ph.D. candidate, co-advised with Prof. Hari Balakrishnan)

Jeremy Carin (Ph.D. candidate)

Alumni

Jeremy Bogle (M.Eng. 2019, now at Apple, Thesis: A Fundamental Approach for Providing Service-Level Guarantees for Wide-Area Networks)

Ayush Sharma (M.Eng. 2020, Thesis: Aikido: Toward Straggler Mitigation for Distributed Machine Learning Training in Cloud Data Centers)

Amir Farhat (SuperUROP, Fall 2019 -- Spring 2020, Project: Communication Patterns in Distributed Deep Learning)

Tenzin Ukyab (UROP, Fall 2019 -- Spring 2020, now PhD student at UC Berkeley)

James Salamy (M.Sc. 2021, Thesis: Network Requirements for Distributed Machine Learning Training in the Cloud)

Dr. Moein Khazraee (Postdoc, Summer 2020 -- Summer 2022, now at NVIDIA)

Alex Mallery (Ph.D. student, Fall 2021 -- Summer 2022, now at Skydio)

Christian T Williams (M.Eng. 2023, now at Jane Street, Thesis: LightSpeed: A Framework to Profile and Evaluate Inference Accelerators at Scale)

Yichen Gao (Undergraduate student)

Arthur Migdal (Undergraduate student)

Liam Kronman (Undergraduate student)

Dr. Lingling Fan (Postdoc, Summer 2023 -- Summer 2024, co-advised with Prof. Dirk Englund)

Dr. Zhizhen Zhong (Postdoc, Fall 2020 -- Fall 2023)

Dr. Homa Esfahanizadeh (Postdoc, Spring 2020 -- Fall 2023, co-advised with Prof. Muriel Medard)

Andew Li (Undergraduate student)

Professional Activities

Member of the Steering Committee, USENIX NSDI, 2024

Program Co-Chair, USENIX NSDI, 2023

General Co-Chair, ACM HotNets, 2023

Workshop Co-Chair, Optica OFC workshop on Machine Learning and Optics, 2023

Program Committee, ACM SIGCOMM, 2022

Program Committee, USENIX NSDI, 2022

Program Chair, ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Optical Systems (OptSys), 2021

Program Committee, ACM SOSP, 2021

Program Committee, USENIX OSDI, 2021

Co-chair, Optics and Machine Learning Symposium, OFC, 2021

Program Committee, USENIX NSDI, 2021

Program Committee, OFC, 2021

Workshops Chair, ACM SIGCOMM, 2020

Program Committee, ACM SIGCOMM, 2020

Program Committee, USENIX NSDI, 2020

Program Committee, USENIX ATC, 2020

Program Committee, ACM HotNets, 2019

Program Committee, ACM SIGCOMM, 2019

Program Chair, New England Network and Systems (NENS), 2019

Program Chair, ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Optical Systems (OptSys), 2019

Program Committee, USENIX NSDI, 2019

Program Committee, OSA Photonic Networks and Devices, 2018

Program Committee, ACM CoNEXT, 2018

Program Committee, ACM IMC, 2018

Program Committee, ACM HotNets, 2018

Program Committee, ACM SOSR, 2018

General Chair, ACM SOSR, 2018

Program Committee, APNet, 2018

Program Committee, IEEE HPSR, 2018

Program Committee, ACM HotMobile, 2018

Mentoring co-chair, N2Women workshop at ACM SIGCOMM, 2017

Program Committee, ACM SIGCOMM, 2017

Program Committee, ACM IMC, 2017

Program Committee, ACM SOSR, 2017

Program Committee, ACM CoNEXT, 2017

Program Committee, IEEE ICNP, 2017

Program Committee, IEEE/IFICO TMA, 2017

Program Committee, APNet, 2017

Program Committee, PAM, 2017

Program Committee, IEEE MASCOTS, 2017

Program Committee, USENIX NSDI, 2016

Program Committee, ACM CoNEXT, 2016

Program Committee, IEEE Hot Interconnects, 2016

Program Committee, ACM SOSR, 2015

Program Committee, ACM CoNEXT, 2015

Program Committee, IEEE Hot Interconnects, 2015

Program Committee, ACM CoNEXT student workshop, 2013

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