Yongchao He, PhD student from the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (IIIS) at Tsinghua University, and his collaborators have won the Distinguished Paper Award at the 28th ACM international conference on architectural support for programming languages and operating systems (ASPLOS 2023) for their paper "A Generic Service to Provide In-network Aggregation for Key-value Streams". This is the first time that this award has been granted to a Tsinghua member as the first author.

Key-value stream aggregation is a common operation in distributed systems, e.g., big data, distributed machine learning, and high performance computing, which requires intensive computation and network resources. To accelerate the aggregation performance, Yongchao He and his collaborators proposed ASK, a generic in-network aggregation service for key-value streams. ASK uses emerging programmable switch hardware to support in-network aggregation, performs decentralized, dynamic, best-effort aggregation, and makes in-depth optimization tailored to traffic characteristics, hardware restrictions, and network unreliable natures. ASK could accelerate pure key-value aggregation tasks by up to 155 times and big data jobs by 3-5 times.

The work is conducted by Yongchao He in collaboration with Wenfei Wu (Peking University), Yanfang Le (Intel), Ming Liu (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and ChonLam Lao (Harvard University) and Yongchao He is the first author.

ASPLOS is a premier conference in computer architecture sponsored by ACM. It focuses on computer architecture, programming languages, operating systems, and associated areas such as networking and storage. This year, the conference received 598 submissions, with 128 papers accepted with an acceptance rate of 21%, and 11 papers were awarded the distinguished paper award.

The full paper is available at https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3575693.3575708