Research profile

The fundamental question I want to answer in my research is how to use specialization to make databases and data processing operations more efficient in the datacenter. In my work, I aim to achieve the goals described in the NOPE Manifesto.

See presentations about my work on this Youtube playlist.

My dissertation explored how we can reduce data movement bottlenecks in large distributed systems by pushing computation closer to storage. The outcome is Caribou: a distributed key-value store that runs entirely on FPGAs. It provides replication for fault tolerance and near-data filtering while meeting the network's line-rate requirements. Caribou is open source and can be used as a starting point for exploring near-data processing for emerging workloads.

Working with me

ITU students: I have several proposals for semester-projects that can be turned later into Master theses. See the list on the DASYA site.

Team at ITU

• Paul David Rosero -- PostDoc since June 2021

Students I currently advise

• Mircea Murasan -- Master Thesis at ITU (with Bernardo Machado)
• Paula Benedec -- Bachelor Thesis at UTCN, RO (with A. Hangan and G. Sebestyen-Pal)
• Andrei Tosa -- Bachelor Thesis at UTCN, RO (with A. Hangan and G. Sebestyen-Pal)

[Full list of alumni]

Publications

[My profile on Google Scholar]

  2021

  An Experimental Framework for Improving the Performance of BFT Consensus For Future Permissioned Blockchains   M. Sit, M. Bravo, Zs. István. The 15th ACM International Conference on Distributed and Event-based Systems (DEBS'21), July 2021 [pdf] [repository]

  The Case for Adding Privacy-Related Offloading to Smart Storage   C. Mihali, A. Hangan, G. Sebestyen, Zs. István. The 14th ACM International Systems and Storage Conference (SYSTOR'21), June 2021 [pdf]

 Software-Defined Data Protection: Low Overhead Policy Compliance at the Storage Layer is Within Reach! (Vision Paper)   Zs. István, S. Ponnapalli, V. Chidambaram. Proceedings of VLDB, Volume 14, No. 7, March 2021 [pdf] [early version on arXiv]

 Very Short Primer on Blockchain Technology for Database Researchers (Part of a Tutorial at EDBT'21)   Zs. István.24th International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT'21), Nicosia, Cyprus, 2021.  [pdf]

  2020

 Towards Improving the Performance of BFT Consensus For Future Permissioned Blockchains.   M. Bravo, Zs. István, MK. Sit. Technical Report on arXiv (2007.12637), July 2020 [pdf][talk at SPMA@EuroSys20 workshop]

 FPGA-Accelerated Analytics: From Single Nodes to Clusters.   Zs. István, K. Kara, D. Sidler. Now Publishers Foundations and Trends in Databases, to appear later in 2020 [draft manuscript available for free on request]

 Let’s Add Transactions to FPGA-based Key-Value Stores!   Zs. István. 16th International Workshop on Data Management on New Hardware (DAMON) held with ACM SIGMOD/PODS 2020. [pdf]

 StreamChain: Rethinking Blockchain for Datacenters.   L. Kuhring, Zs. István, A. Sorniotti, M. Vukolić. Technical Report on arXiv (1808.08406), Feb. 2020 [pdf]

  2019

 Specialize in Moderation -- Building Application-aware Storage Services using FPGAs in the Datacenter.   L. Kuhring, E. Garcia, Zs. István. 11th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems (HotStorage'19), Renton, WA, USA, July 2019. [pdf and slides]

 doppioDB 1.0: Machine Learning inside a Relational Engine.   G. Alonso, Zs. István, K. Kara, M. Owaida, D. Sidler. IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, June 2019. [pdf] 

 Something New Under The Sun: Thoughts on Optimizing the Performance of Blockchains. (Position paper).   Zs. István. 9th Workshop on Systems for Multi-core and Heterogeneous Architectures co-located with EuroSys'19 (No Proceedings), Dresden, DE, 2019. [pdf]

 The Glass Half Full: Using Programmable Hardware Accelerators in Analytics.   Zs. István. IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, March 2019. [pdf] [slides: IMDEA seminar]

 Design Patterns for Code Reuse in HLS Packet Processing Pipelines.   H. Eran, L. Zeno, Zs. István and M. Silberstein. 27th IEEE International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM'19), San Diego, USA, 2019. [pdf]

  2018

 StreamChain: Do Blockchains Need Blocks? (Workshop).   Zs. István, A. Sorniotti, M. Vukolić. 2nd Workshop on Scalable and Resilient Infrastructures for Distributed Ledgers (SERIAL 2018) [pdf] [slides]

 Providing Multi-tenant Services with FPGAs: Case Study on a Key-Value Store.  Zs. István, G. Alonso. A. Singla. 28th International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL'18), Dublin, Ireland, August 2018. [pdf] [slides]
Code on Github: [code]

 A Flexible K-Means Operator for Hybrid Databases.  Z. He, D. Sidler, Zs. István, G. Alonso. 28th International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL'18), Dublin, Ireland, August 2018. [pdf]

 Active Pages 20 Years Later: Active Storage for the Cloud.  Zs. István, D. Sidler, G. Alonso. In IEEE Internet Computing July/Aug 2018. [pdf]

  2017

 Caribou: Intelligent Distributed Storage. Zs. Istvan, D. Sidler, G. Alonso. To appear in VLDB 2017, Munich, Germany. [pdf] [slides]
Resources for the larger project: [Code on Github] [Short Video]

 Accelerating Pattern Matching Queries in Hybrid CPU-FPGA Architectures. D. Sidler, Zs. Istvan, M. Ewaida, G. Alonso. 2017 ACM SIGMOD/PODS Conference (SIGMOD'17), Chicago, US. [pdf]

  2016

 Low-Latency TCP/IP Stack for Data Center Applications. D. Sidler, Zs. Istvan, G. Alonso. 26th International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL'16), Lausanne, Switzerland, September 2016. [pdf] 

 Runtime Parameterizable Regular Expression Operators for Databases. Zs. Istvan*, D. Sidler*, G. Alonso. (*=equal contribution).  The 24th IEEE International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM'16), May 2016. [pdf] 

 Consensus in a Box: Inexpensive Coordination in Hardware. Zs. Istvan, D. Sidler, G. Alonso, M. Vukolic. 13th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI '16), March 2016. [pdf] [slides+audio] [slides]

  2015

 A Hash Table for Line Rate Data Processing. Zs. Istvan, G. Alonso, M. Blott, K. Vissers. ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems (TRETS) - Special FPL'13 Issue, March 2015. [pdf]

  2014

 Ibex -- An Intelligent Storage Engine with Support for Advanced SQL Off-loading. L. Woods, Zs. Istvan, G. Alonso. VLDB 2014, Hangzhou, China, September 2014. [pdf]

 Histograms as a Side Effect of Data Movement for Big Data. Zs. Istvan, L. Woods, G. Alonso. 2014 ACM SIGMOD/PODS Conference (SIGMOD'14), Snowbird, Utah, US. [pdf]

  2013

 A Flexible Hash Table Design For 10Gbps Key-value Stores on FPGAs. Zs. Istvan, G. Alonso, M. Blott, K. Vissers. 23rd International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL'13), Porto, Portugal, 2-4 September 2013. [pdf]

 Achieving 10Gbps Line-rate Key-value Stores with FPGAs. M. Blott, K. Karras, L. Liu, K. Vissers, Zs. Istvan, J. Bar. 5th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing (HotCloud'13), San Jose, CA, 25-26 June 2013. [pdf] [slides]

 Multi-threaded Active Objects. L. Henrio, F. Huet, Zs. Istvan. 15th International Conference on Coordination models and Languages (COORDINATION 2013), Firenze, Italy, 3-5 June 2013. [pdf]

  2011

 Adapting Active Objects to Multicore Architectures. L. Henrio, F. Huet, Zs. Istvan, G. Sebestyen. International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Computing (ISPDC 2011). [pdf]

Patents

Systems and Methods for Providing Distributed Tree Traversal Using Hardware-Based Processing (US 20160147779 A1). Kenneth H. Eguro, Zsolt Istvan, Arvind Arasu, Ravishankar Ramamurthy, Kaushik Shriraghav. Patent application filed 11/26/14.

Demos, Posters, Various

Extend, not Just Accelerate! Fresh Thinking Talk at DAMON workshop @ SIGMOD 2021. [slides]

In-Storage Data Transformations for Enforceable Privacy
[Poster] [1 min. teaser] for European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys'20), Crete, Greece, April 2020.

FPGA-Based Distributed Storage for Parquet Files
[Demo] for 45th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB'19), LA, August 2019.
[Demo] for 29th International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL'19), Barcelona, September 2019.

Enzian: a Research Computer for Datacenter and Rackscale Computing.
Poster for European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys'18), Porto, Portugal.

Caribou: A Platform for Building Smart Storage
[Poster] for European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys'17), Belgrade, Serbia, 24-26 April 2017.

doppioDB: A Hardware Accelerated Database
[Demo][Poster] for SIGMOD 2017, Chicago IL, 2017

Specialized Microservers for the Data Center
[Poster] for European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys'15), Bordeaux, France, 21-24 March 2015.
[Demo] for 25th International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL'15), London, UK, September 2015.

Hybrid FPGA-accelerated SQL Query Processing
[Demo] for 23rd International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL'13), Porto, Portugal, 2-4 September 2013.

Service and Events

Organization:

• Workshop co-chair for EuroSys'21
• Co-chairing SERIAL Workshop @Middleware'20
• Co-chairing SPMA Workshop @Eurosys'20
• Co-chairing SERIAL Workshop @Middleware'19
• Co-chairing SFMA Workshop @Eurosys'19
• Co-organized birds of a feather session @Middleware'18.

Reviewing (can be out of date):
SIGMOD'21, EDBT'21, HotCloud'20, SRDS'20, ASPLOS'20 (light), FCCM'20, EDBT'20, EuroSys Doctoral Workshop 2020 and 2019.
Invited reviews for ACM TACO and IEEE TKDE journals.

Previously working with me...

• Jonas Aargard -- Bachelor Thesis at ITU until May 2021 (with Philippe Bonnet)
• Niels Nielsen and Robert Mayer -- Bachelor Thesis at ITU until May 2021 (with Pinar Tozun)
• Claudiu Mihali -- BSc Thesis at UTCN, RO, June 2020 (with A. Hangan and G. Sebestyen-Pal)
• Mustapha Bouhali -- Visting PhD student (ENP Oran, DZ)
• Samuel Garcia -- BSc. until May 2020 (UPM, ES)
• Man-Kit Sit -- PhD intern until Apr. 2020 (ICL, UK)
• Lukas Stasytis -- BSc. intern until Dec. 2019 (KTU, LI)
• Lucas Kuhring, Srivatsan Lakshminarayanan -- MSc. thesis until June 2019 (UPM, ES)
• Matei Istoan -- Visiting Post-Doc until April 2019 (ICL, UK)
• Eva Garcia -- BSc. Intern until Feb. 2019 (from UAM, ES)