Nik Sultana's homepage

Nik Sultana, PhD

Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Illinois Institute of Technology

Contact: nsultana1 at(symbol) iit dot edu

I'm interested in building better (performance + flexibility + security) distributed systems, and I develop techniques for this using programming theory, formal logic, and systems engineering.

Bio: Before joining Illinois Tech I was a postdoc at the UPenn Distributed Systems Lab and at the Cambridge Systems Research Group where I worked on various research projects on computer systems. Up to my PhD I did theoretical research. For my PhD I developed a compiler-based approach to proof translation, and before that I worked on constructive proof search and the verification of refactorings using interactive theorem-proving. I did my undergrad at the University of Malta.

Research Opportunities

If you're an Illinois Tech student, check out my page on BS/MS student projects related to my research.
Regardless of whether you're currently an Illinois Tech student, you can find out more about funded PhD opportunities related to my research. You can find out more about my research by browsing this homepage.

Resources

Feel free to reach out to me about the following resources which I created and curate:

The Networked Systems Tech Talks is open to all regardless of affiliation.
General list of IIT- and Chicago-related Resources.
Computer Science research mailing list at IIT.

Recent

December 2024. Congrats Leelavathi on completing the RES-MATCH project that builds on the IIT fork of the CODES simulator.
November 2024. Helped to organize the INDIS (International Workshop on Innovating the Network for Data-Intensive Science) workshop.
November 2024. Two CREASE updates: (1) we did our first code contribution to FABRIC's fablib, and (2) our first blog post describes how non-research aspects of the CREASE project support its research.
October 2024. Check out Vaneshi's C2ST blog post about her project.
October 2024. Second beta of CREASE is released! In addition to helping FABRIC users, it's also intended to help users of the P4 language.
October 2024. Our paper on using FABRIC to teach networking was accepted at SIGCSE'25!
September 2024. KNIT9 and MERIF were great! Alexander and Bjoern each gave demos and posters about their work. Nishanth talked about Patchwork and I talked about CREASE.
September 2024. Our paper on "Shape-shifting Elephants" was accepted at HotNets'24!
August 2024. First beta of CREASE has been released!
August 2024. Short paper on running GraphBLAS on FABRIC was accepted at HPEC 2024, and received an Outstanding Short Paper Award! Congrats Vaneshi and Hyunsuk!
July 2024. Gave FABRIC Webinar on debuggable, programmable networking -- watch online!
July 2024. CREASE website is now online for this newly-funded NSF project!
July 2024. We released example notebooks on running GraphBLAS on FABRIC. Kudos to Vaneshi and Hyunsuk!
July 2024. Poster presented at Fermilab's 57th Annual Users Meeting. Kudos to the whole team.
May 2024. Congrats to Alexander for receiving the Graduate TA award from the Computer Science department! Most recently he TA'd CS542.
May 2024. v1.0 of Caper released (5+ years since development began!) with inputs from several contributors.
April 2024. Honored to receive a URA VSP award that funds more work with collaborators at Fermilab.
April 2024. Congrats to Alexander for his demo+poster at HotSoS!
March 2024. The accompanying material to my KNIT8 keynote includes a tutorial, code, and slides.
March 2024. Our work on adapting Remote Attestation to dataplanes is featured in the Thread the Needle blog.
March 2024. TransparNet website now online.
March 2024. Alexander, Hyunsuk, Nishanth and Prajwal prepared excellent demos for KNIT8 in San Diego! These are their posters:

Congrats to Hyunsuk for winning runner-up best poster!
Meanwhile in Chicago, Alberto, Laura, Pilar, and Vaneshi will be presenting their exciting work at the IIT College of Computing research event! These are their posters:
February 2024. Our paper on Patchwork was accepted at CNERT'24 -- well done to the team!
January 2024. Congratulations to Hyunsuk and Sean for receiving an Honorable Mention for Outstanding Undergraduate Research from CRA, and to Sean for receiving an award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research from IIT's College of Computing.
January 2024. Excited to share the C2ST blog post on my trip report from last summer's visit to Fermilab.
January 2024. You can now read the journal version of the CSaw work.

December 2023. Congrats Prajwal on completing the RES-MATCH project with me and with Kevin Brown at ANL, and which is being open-sourced as the IIT fork of the CODES simulator.
November 2023. (1) SC23 was great! On top of that, (2) Nishanth and Mohammad both won demo awards at INDIS, with Alexander and Nishanth receiving an award for best demo, and (3) we helped out at the RENCI booth on a tutorial about using ESnet's open-source smartNIC platform for P4 + FPGA development, on the NSF-funded FABRIC testbed.
You can see Nishanth's FABRIC demo recording and the associated slides and write-up, and Mohammad's slides.
(1) (2) (3)
November 2023. Very excited that our ESnet P4 workflow for FABRIC documentation is now online! Huge well-done to Mohammad who worked on this, evolving on materials used for CS595 during Fall'23.
November 2023. Congrats Aditi for the presentation she gave about Caper! Thanks to Prof Jeremy Hajek for co-mentoring her, and to IIT's chapters of ACM-W and ACM for hosting. A recorded version of this presentation is available.
October 2023. Work on DAQ networking is being presented at CPAD'23 -- congrats to Sean, Hyunsuk, Nishanth, and our Fermilab collaborators.
September 2023. Alexander, Nishanth, and I are presenting a short paper at INDIS'23.
September 2023. If you're attending the upcoming (1) FABRIC KNIT workshop then do check out the demos by (2) Mohammad, (3) Sean and (4) Nishanth!
(1) (2) (3) (4)
September 2023. New version of Caper released, with inputs from Hyunsuk, Marelle and Aditi!
September 2023. Congrats Yun for her C2ST blog post about her CS543 project.
August 2023. Congrats Mohammad and Sean for their C2ST blog post about attending KNIT6.
July 2023. Launched site for Caper at http://caper.cs.iit.edu/ which features a Filter Filtering quiz!
April 2023. Honored to receive a URA VSP award that funds more work with collaborators at Fermilab.
March 2023. Congrats to Mohammad for his poster at HotSoS! At HotSoS I'll also be giving two presentations about recent work: PERA (HotNets'22) and Pitchfork (ACSAC'22).
February 2023. Congrats to Cyprien for his AnNet paper on semantic forwarding (repo, TR), and Henry and Junyong for their APDCM paper on C-Saw (repo, TR)!
January 2023. Launched site for the networked systems tech talks.
November 2022. Launched project site for the Pitchfork project.
October 2022. Paper accepted at the EuroP4 workshop -- congrats to Shivam and our collaborators!
October 2022. Released code and examples from the Pitchfork project.
October 2022. Giving short talk at OCP FTS, and a demo at ICNP 2022.
September 2022. Paper on PERA accepted at HotNets, and paper on Pitchfork accepted at ACSAC!
August 2022. Updated the pages on student projects for Fall 2022 and PhD funding, and added a new page about misc resources.
April 2022. Huge congrats to three students I worked with: Heena started a PhD at UPenn, Henry is starting a PhD at UIUC, and Junyong is starting a PhD at University of Arizona.
April 2022. Honored to be a recipient of this year's Google Research Scholar program.
March 2022. Congrats to Cyprien, Luis, Neil, Xue, Mohamad, Mohammad, Rigden, and Shivam for participating in the College of Computing poster event, and Cyprien for winning an award!
January 2022. Gave talk on Research and Teaching Resources for Programmable Networking at the ITU Focus Group on Autonomous Networks.

Research interests

Distributed systems, Programmable networking, Security (software and network), Automated reasoning, Formal methods.

Acknowledgement for research funding/support: NSF, DARPA, Google, RES-MATCH, URA, XUP.
I'm also very grateful to the FABRIC and Chameleon testbeds for enabling some of my group's work.

Teaching

Spring'25 (Upcoming): CS542 sections 04 (in person) and 05 (online): Computer Networks.
Spring'24: CS542: Computer Networks
Fall'23: CS595: Applications of Programmable Networking
Spring'23: CS543/ITM595-05: Software-Defined Networking
Fall'22: CS351: Systems Programming
Spring'22: CS595/ITM595: Designing Large-Scale Networked Systems
Spring'22: CS695: Doctoral Seminar

Group

At Illinois Tech I'm currently working with:

(Undergrad) Hyunsuk Bang
(MS) Alberto Perez Bogantes
(Undergrad) Sean Cummings
(MS) Pilar Fernandez Gayol
(MS) Vaneshi Ramdhony
(RSE) Nishanth Shyamkumar
(MS) Laura Serrano Velazquez
(MS) Prajwal Somendyapanahalli Venkateshmurthy
(PhD) Alexander Wolosewicz

See my page on funded opportunities for a PhD in Computer Science related to my research.

If you're already at Illinois Tech, I'm happy to discuss undergrad (CS49{1,7}) and MS (CS59{1,7}) projects. Also see my current list of student projects.

Previously at Illinois Tech I worked with Neil Dhote, Xue Zhang, Rigden Atsatsang, Mohamad Dib Fares, Luis Casarrubios Elez, Cyprien Gueyraud, Simrat Kaur, Irina Klein, Shivam Patel, H. E. Greenblatt, Mohammad Firas Sada, Aditi Kumar, Marelle León, and Willow Carlson-Huber.

Earlier, at the University of Pennsylvania I worked with the following Research Assistants: Achala Rao, Zihao Jin (visiting from Tsinghua University), Anirudh Chelluri, Nishanth Prabhu, Shilpi Bose, Henry Zhu, Ke Zhong (visiting from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, now a PhD student at Penn), Zhaoyang Han, Ruijie Mao, Digvijaysinh Chauhan, Nishanth Shyamkumar, Shivani Burad, Zhilei Zheng, Garvit Khandelwal, Ritvik Sadana, Rakesh Nagda, Heena Nagda (from Georgia Tech), Stephen Carrasquillo, Junyong Zhao, Saket, Andrew Zhao, and Aishwarya Wesanekar.

And before that at the University of Cambridge I supervised Jonny Shipton's 2016 UROP (research internship) and the "Part II" (undergrad dissertation) projects of Thomas Le Feuvre, Radu Voroneanu (co-supervised with Lucas Dixon), Daniel Spencer (co-supervised with Richard Mortier), and Rupert Horlick (co-supervised with Richard Mortier).

Projects & System Releases

Pitchfork (2022, on GitLab) Decomposition of C programs for privilege separation.

Flightplan (2020, on GitHub) Decomposition & heterogeneous allocation of P4 programs to benefit SDN.

Emu (2017, on GitHub) New standard library for creating high-performance network functions using HLS.

Flowdar (2019, on GitLab) Understanding the flow of control, data, and resource-usage of software.

Pax (2016, on GitHub) and projects that build on top of it: TCPuny and Recap. Abstractions for packet-processors written in high-level & managed languages.

DoSarray (2018, on GitHub) Carrying out experiments involving Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks and mitigations.

Motto (2016, on GitHub) Compiler and reference runtime for the Flick system for application-level services.

Smaller systems:

Apache httpd Worker Union MPM (2019, GitLab)
TYM Datalog (2019, GitHub)
Caper (2019, GitLab)

hashtray (2019, GitLab)
DoStbin (2018, GitLab)
Kneecap (2016, GitHub)

Most of my work is released as open source. For other projects see my GitHub and GitLab.

Publications

These are indexed at DBLP and Google Scholar.

Recent work:

A DSL for Reconfigurable, Distributed Software Architecture. (APDCM 2023)
Paper Code Site Technical Report Journal Cite

Towards In-Network Semantic Analysis. (AnNet 2023)
Paper Code Technical Report Cite

Towards Practical Application-level Support for Privilege Separation. (ACSAC 2022)
Paper Code Site Slides Cite

In-Network Fractional Calculations using P4 for Scientific Computing workloads. (EuroP4 2022)
Paper Code Technical Report Data Cite

A Case for Remote Attestation in Programmable Dataplanes. (HotNets 2022)
Paper Cite

Experiment Planning for Heterogeneous Programmable Networks. (TEPN 2022)
Paper Cite

IPC Evolution thru Declarative Interface Generation. (DAI-SNAC 2021)
Paper Cite

Leveraging In-Network Application Awareness. (NAI 2021)
Paper Video Slides Cite

Meta-level issues in Offloading: Scoping, Composition,Development, and their Automation. (LATTE 2021)
Paper Video Cite

FDP: A Teaching and Demonstration Platform for Networking. (SIGCSE 2021)
Abstract Site Demo Video Cite

Flightplan: Dataplane Disaggregation and Placement for P4 Programs. (NSDI 2021)
Paper Code Site Video Slides Demo Demo Write-up Cite

Debugging strongly-compartmentalized distributed systems. (APDCM 2020)
Paper Video Cite

Trace-based Behaviour Analysis of Network Servers. (CNSM 2019)
Paper Code Poster Cite

My short essay on bounded latency made it to the finals of the Tipping Point Prize!

Hashtray: Turning the tables on Scalable Client Classification. (AnNet 2019)
Paper Code Cite

What we talk about when we talk about pcap expressions. (Real-World DSLs 2019)
Paper Code Run online Cite

DoSarray: An extensible evaluation system for DoS research. (COMSNETS 2019)
Paper Code Data Cite

Making Break-ups Less Painful: Source-level Support for Transforming Legacy Software into a Network of Tasks. (FEAST 2018)
Paper Cite

In-network computing to the rescue of faulty links. (NetCompute 2018)
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Chapter on "Codebreaking after the Second World War" with Markulf Kohlweiss and Tony Hoare for the booklet that accompanies the Codebreakers and Groundbreakers exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in 2017.

Report on Networking and Programming Languages 2017. (CCR)
Write-up Cite

Emu: Rapid Prototyping of Networking Services. (ATC 2017)
Paper Code Cite

Extending programs with debug-related features, with application to hardware development.
Draft Cite

Kneecap: model-based generation of network traffic. (SMT 2016)
Paper Code Cite

Light at the middle of the tunnel: middleboxes for selective disclosure of network monitoring to distrusted parties. (HotMiddlebox 2016)
Paper Cite