Ahmed Saeed

Assistant Professor
[NRG] [SCS] [CoC]
Georgia Institute of Technology
asaeed [@] cc [.] gatech [.] edu

News (scroll for more)

Paper accepted at NSDI 2024 December, 2023
Inho's work on building a high-resolution latency debugger that can detect microsecond-level latency events was accepted to NSDI 2024.
Demi will receive the PURA Salary Award in Spring 2024 December, 2023
Eric won 1st place at SIGCOMM 2023 SRC September, 2023
Eric presented his poster at SIGCOMM 2023, winning the 1st of the Student Research Competition (SRC) in the undergraduate category.
Received funding from Spec Tech to explore routing problems for nanomodular electronics. September, 2023
I am the PI on a $40k award from Spec Tech to improve the scalability of routing and placement algorithms for synthesizing circuits using nanomodular electronics.
Paper accepted at LEO-NET 2023 August, 2023
Vaibhav's work on estimating round trip times in LEO satellite networks was accepted at the workshop on LEO networking and communication that's held in conjunction with MobiCom 2023.
Poster accepted at SIGCOMM 2023 July, 2023
Eric's work on the interaction between overload controllers and core allocators accepted as a poster at SIGCOMM 2023.
Invited to IETF 116 March, 2023
Work on understanding variability in LEO satellite networks invited to IETF 116 by MAPRG.
Paper accepted to PAM'23 December, 2022
The paper offers a thorough characterization of latency variability in LEO satellite networks, exploring its fundamental causes and structure and possible remedies.
Selected among the top five DARPA Risers during the DARPA Forward Conference at Georgia Tech. October, 2022
Our poster on improving the performance and resilience of satellite networks was selected among the top five posters presented by DARPA Risers. DARPA Risers are up-and-coming standouts in their fields, whose research is related to national security and demonstrates the potential to lead to technological surprise — the heart of DARPA's mission.
Recevied an NSF award to reimagine the network stack of edge servers. August, 2022
I am the PI on a $1.19M award from NSF to improve the scalability of edge servers from the hardware to the applications looking at problems in overload control, network stack architecture, and hardware offloads.
Recevied an NSF award to formally verify the performance of resource allocation heuristics. July, 2022
I am the co-PI on a $1.19M award from NSF to develop new models and algorithms to efficiently apply formal methods to analytically identify bounds the performance of resource allocation heuristics used to manage network and CPU resources.
Paper accepted to NSDI '23 July, 2022
Protego is an overload control system that allows applications to maintain their SLOs even in the presence of data-dependent lock contention.
Received research award from Google July, 2022
I received $80,000 from Google to support my work on scalable systems at the edge.
I am serving on the PC of HotNets 2022 June, 2022
I am serving on the PC of NSDI 2023 April, 2022
I am serving on the PC of ANRW 2022 April, 2022
I am serving on the PC of APNET 2022 March, 2022
I am serving on the PC of SIGCOMM 2022 January, 2022
I am serving on the PC of ANCS 2021 Sep., 2021
Started as an Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech! August, 2021
Paper accepted to SIGCOMM May, 2021
CCAC is a new approach to understanding the performance of congestion control algorithms through formal methods.
Paper accepted to MobiSys March, 2021
Mobius allows operators of large fleets of vehicles to navigate the tradeoffs between task fulfillment throughput and fairness to their customers.
Paper presented at PAM March, 2021
Paper accepted to PAM '21 December, 2020
In this paper, we provide a thorough analysis of the bottlenecks that arise in the Linux kernel running on a server as we increase the number of TCP connections handled by the server.
Paper accepted to OSDI '20 August, 2020
Breakwater is an overload control system that allows microsecond-scale RPCs to maintain their Service Level Objectives (SLOs) even when their demand is much larger than available capacity.
Paper accepted to SIGCOMM '20 August, 2020
We identify a new problem in WAN congestion control when WAN traffic competes for bandwidth with datacenter traffic inside the datacenter network. Annulus solves the problem by allowing WAN traffic to react to congestion as fast as datacenter traffic using explicit and direct congestion notification messages.

Bio

Ahmed Saeed is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech. He was a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT working with Prof. Mohammad Alizadeh. He completed his PhD in August 2019 at Georgia Tech, where he was advised by Prof. Mostafa Ammar and Prof. Ellen Zegura. During his PhD, he interned several times at Google, where he collaborated with Nandita Dukkipati and Amin Vahdat. He received his bachelor's degree in Computer and Systems Engineering from Alexandria University in 2010.

Research Interests

Theory, design, and implementation of scalable computer networks and computer systems, including resource scheduling, congestion control, operating systems, and formal methods.

I am looking for highly motivated PhD, master's, and undergraduate students.
I am not hiring TAs or Postdocs for the academic year 2024-2025.

Active projects (more details here):

Scalable End Host Networking

The goal of the project is develop end-host networking stacks that can scale, not only in terms of their messages per second capacity, but in terms of the number of network connections they can handle. To that end, we tackle problems in schedulers, the VM-hypervisor API, and the transport layer.

WAN Congestion Control

Wide area networks (and the Internet at large) are getting more heterogeneous and programmable, proving to be a challenging environment to manage while providing many new knobs to provide better performance. To that end, we explore new tools to better characterize the challenges and new algorithms to address them.

Formal Verification of Performance Properties of Distributed Systems

This project attempts to provide concrete analytical tools to understand the performance of heuristics used in resource allocation and management of distributed system. The project leverages progress made in formal verification tools (e.g., Z3) that can efficiently search through all potential scenarios that can encounter a heuristic. We use such tools to identify scenarios where systems underperform, helping system designers avoid them or plan for them.

Selected Publications (full list)

LDB: An Efficient Latency Debugging Tool for Datacenter Applications
Inho Cho, Seo Jin Park, Ahmed Saeed, Mohammad Alizadeh, Adam Belay
USENIX NSDI 2024 [PDF] [Code]
Protego: Overload Control for Applications with Unpredictable Lock Contention
Inho Cho, Ahmed Saeed, Seo Jin Park, Mohammad Alizadeh, Adam Belay
USENIX NSDI 2023 [PDF] [Code] [Video]
A Characterization of Route Variability in LEO Satellite Networks
Vaibhav Bhosale, Ahmed Saeed, Ketan Bhardwaj, Ada Gavrilovska
PAM 2023 [PDF] [Video]
Formally Verifying Congestion Control Performance
Venkat Arun, Mina Tahmasbi Arashloo, Ahmed Saeed, Mohammad Alizadeh, Hari Balakrishnan
ACM SIGCOMM 2021 [PDF] [Code] [Video]
Annulus: A Dual Congestion Control Loop for Datacenter and WAN Traffic Aggregates
Ahmed Saeed, Varun Gupta, Prateesh Goyal, Milad Sharif, Rong Pan, Mostafa Ammar, Ellen Zegura, Keon Jang, Mohammad Alizadeh, Abdul Kabbani, and Amin Vahdat
ACM SIGCOMM 2020 [PDF] [Slides] [Video]
Overload Control for μs-scale RPCs with Breakwater
Inho Cho, Ahmed Saeed, Joshua Fried, Seo Jin Park, Mohammad Alizadeh, Adam Belay
USENIX OSDI 2020 [PDF] [Video] [Code]
Eiffel: Efficient and Flexible Software Packet Scheduling
Ahmed Saeed, Yimeng Zhao, Nandita Dukkipati, Ellen Zegura, Mostafa Ammar, Khaled Harras, and Amin Vahdat
USENIX NSDI 2019 [PDF] [Extended Version] [Slides] [Video] [Code]
Carousel: Scalable Traffic Shaping at End Hosts
Ahmed Saeed, Nandita Dukkipati, Vytautas Valancius, Vinh The Lam, Carlo Contavalli, and Amin Vahdat
ACM SIGCOMM 2017 [PDF] [Slides] [Video]

Current Students

PhD Students

Jehad Aly - Verifying performance properties of resource allocation heuristics
Feng Zhu (co-advised with Alberto Dainotti) - Inter-AS congestion detection

Master's Students

Aravindhan Krishnan - Resource management for large GPUs
Bhaskar Pardeshi - Congestion control in last-mile networks
Peidi Song (co-advised with Alex Daglis) - Routing and placement of circuits for nanomodular electronics
Eric Stuhr - Interference between core allocators and overload controllers
First Place in the Undergraduate Student Research Competition (SRC) at SIGCOMM 2023.

Undergraduate Students

Demi Lei - Resource management for modular satellites
President’s Undergraduate Research Salary Award (PURA) in Spring 2024.
Muskaan Gupta
Sameer Kapoor
Hyunwoo Kim
Vikrant Talwar
Yoon Ji Cho

Former Students

Nikita Mohan Kokitkar (MSc / Spring 2022 - Spring 2023) now at Microsoft
Saubhik Mukherjee (MSc / Fall 2021 - Spring 2022) now at Samba Nova
Joshua Olaniran (Undergraduate at Kennesaw State University / Summer 2022)

Teaching

Spring 2024: Datacenter Networks & Systems (CS 8803)
Fall 2023: Computer Networking I (CS 3251)
Spring 2023: Datacenter Networks & Systems (CS 8803)
Fall 2022: Computer Networking I (CS 3251)
Spring 2022: Datacenter Networks & Systems (CS 8803)
Fall 2021: Computer Networking I (CS 3251)

Thanks

I am very grateful to the following sponsors for supporting my research: