Category: Events

Congratulations to Dr. Bochra Boughzala on successfully defending her Ph.D. thesis, Accelerating Real-Time Data Analytics! Her work shows how middleware services such as publish/subscribe and stream processing systems can benefit from in-network computing. She proposes and analyzes mechanisms that:

• stabilize end-to-end latency in publish/subscribe systems
• accelerate consensus decisions
• horizontally scale streaming operators.

All of these mechanisms run resource-efficiently on P4-programmable hardware.

Overall, Boris Koldehofe advised as main supervisors three Ph.D. thesis at the University of Groningen:

1. Saad Saleh. Methods and Design for Analog Computing Architectures: Memristors for Enhancing Expressiveness and Energy-Efficiency of Packet Processors. PhD thesis, University of Groningen Press, 2025. [ bib | DOI | http ]
2. Majid Lotfian Delouee. Adapting Event Processing in Dynamic IoT Applications, Meeting Evolving Requirements for Quality, Privacy, and Rule Autonomy. PhD thesis, University of Groningen Press, 2025. [ bib | DOI | http ]
3. Bochra Boughzala. Accelerating Real-Time Data-Analytics with In-Network Computing: Programmable Packet Processors for Enhancing the Efficiency of Distributed Stream Processing. PhD thesis, University of Groningen Press, 2026. [ bib | http ]

From Sep 1-4, the conference on Network Centric Systems (NetSys 2025) with 140 registered participants was held in Ilmenau and locally organized by the DSOS research group.  

The conference series is organized biannually by the special interest groups KuVS and ITG of the German Informatics Society (GI) and the Association for Electrical, Electronic & Information Technologies (VDE), respectively. The conference aims to facilitate networking and the exchange of ideas on current topics in the fields of distributed systems and computer networks.An interview on the background of the conference with Prof. Koldehofe is available as part of the  Uni Online article “Networked in the “Internet of Everything”: International conference at TU Ilmenau discusses networks of the future”.

The CogniGron Research Center and the Distributed Systems Research Groups of TU Ilmenau and University of Groningen have organized a workshop to discuss research findings, initiatives, and challenges for Sustainability in Distributed and Networked Systems.

Researchers from the University of Groningen, TU Ilmenau, and TU Darmstadt met to exchange on initiatives like the CogniGron research center, the Ilmenau School of Green electronics, the collaborative research center MAKI, and a new project on green business process management. Furthermore, the workshop enabled in the form of excellent presentations of young researchers to exchange research findings towards sustainability in distributed and networked systems by taking the hardware and software perspectives. A particular highlight of the workshop was the dissertation talk of Saad Saleh on „Methods and Design for Analog Computing Architectures Memristors for Enhancing Expressiveness and Energy-Efficiency of Packet Processors. “ Saad Saleh successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis on Jan 7.

Workshop Program:

09:00 Welcome and Overview  

09:10 Introduction of Research Teams of Darmstadt, Ilmenau and Groningen

Prof. Ralf Steinmetz: Future Internet Research at the Collaborative Research Center MAKI

Prof. Beatriz Noheda (UG): The CogniGron Research Center at the University of Groningen

Prof. Alexander  Lazovik: Research overview at Groningen, Distributed Systems  

Prof. Boris Koldehofe: Research overview at Ilmenau 

10:30–10:50 Coffee/tea break  

10:50–12:15 Network and Hardware centric perspective  

Dr. Peter Amthor (TU Ilmenau): The Ilmenau School of Green Electronics

Wenfei Huang (TU Ilmenau): Optical In-Network Computing

Bochra Boughzala (UG): In-Network Distributed Computing 

12:15–13:15 Lunch break 

13:15–14:00 CogniGron Dissertation Talk Saad Saleh (45 minutes)  

Methods and Design for Analog Computing Architectures Memristors for Enhancing Expressiveness and Energy-Efficiency of Packet Processors

14:00 – 15:15 RUG DS & IS: Data Management Perspective 

Mahmoud Alasmar: Improving Resource Utilization in DNN Training Jobs on GPU Cluster

Michel Medema: Environmental Sustainability in Business Process Management

15:15–15:45 Coffee/tea break  

15:45–16:35 DSOS II: Service Level Perspective on Energy-Efficient Computing 

Mehran Salmani: Efficient Inference Serving at scale

Ahmad Baghdadi: Reliable and efficient message-oriented-middleware.

16:35–17:00 Wrap up 

After being officially welcomed at TU Ilmenau, Boris Koldehofe gave his inaugural lecture at TU Ilmenau on Nov 1st 2023. In his talk named “Accelerating the performance of data driven applications with in-network computing” he discussed how advances in programmable networks can aid to accelerate data-intensive applications in form of in-network computing. Besides discussing technical solutions and research challenges he highlighted also recent research towards energy-efficient in-network computing architectures.

More information:

• Bochra Boughzala, Christoph Gärtner, and Boris Koldehofe. Window-based Parallel Operator Execution with In-Network Computing. Proceedings of the 16th ACM International Conference on Distributed and Event-based Systems (DEBS ’22), pp. 91–96, ACM press.
• Ralf Kundel and Fridolin Siegmund and Rhaban Hark and Amr Rizk and Boris Koldehofe. Network Testing Utilizing Programmable Networking Hardware. IEEE Communications Magazine, 7 pages, IEEE 2022.
• Bowmik, Tariq, Koldehofe, Kohler, Dürr, Rothermel. High Performance Publish/Subscribe Middleware in Software-defined Networks. IEEE Transactions on Networking (ToN), 2016.

Saad Saleh presented his research on Memristor-based Cognitive and Energy Efficient In-network computing at the Brainspiration 2022 conference, University of Twente, Netherlands. The conference focused on brain-inspired concepts and materials for information processing.

The motivation for brain-inspired computing emerges from the current generation of computers which huge amounts of energy resources and lack cognitive functionality which is critical for many applications like self-driving cars. In this regard, the CogniGron research center at the University of Groningen has developed materials, called memristors, which consume less energy resources and provide cognitive functionality similar to the human brain. Saad presented the use of these cognitive materials for the Internet components and showed various design models and techniques for incorporating cognitive functionality inside the Internet. Preliminary results have shown promising power consumption statistics of these materials for Internet components requiring little (16 uW during operational mode) to no energy consumption (during standby mode).

The speakers and attendees at the conference included renowned scientists and researchers from academia and industry including Beatriz Noheda (CogniGron), Julie Grollier (Thales), John Paul Strachan (Forschungszentrum Jülich), Abu-Sebastian (IBM), Andrea Liu (UPenn), Wilfred Gerard (UT), Wolfram Pernice (Heidelberg University), and researchers from HP labs (USA), Sandia National Labs (USA), AMOLF (NL).

This research is in collaboration with Anouk Goossens and Tamalika Banerjee from Zernike Institute of Advanced Materials, University of Groningen. For more information about this research, contact Saad Saleh or Boris Koldehofe (Adviser).

Young system researchers, e.g., Ph.D. students and PostDocs, can now apply for the EuroSys 2023 Shadow PC until October 12th.

A Shadow PC is meant to allow young researchers to obtain insight into the review process of major conferences. Typically, the review process of a big conference like EuroSys is rather intransperrant to young researchers. Therefore, it isn’t easy to understand what requires excellent research work to be accepted.

In a shadow PC (shadowing the programm commitee), young researchers actively review the research papers submitted to the conference. In EuroSys, papers submitted to the conference will also be assigned to members of the shadow PC for review with the permission of the authors. In addition, the shadow PC will determine and discuss its own ranking of submitted papers. Although the outcome will and must not impact the decision of the conference program committee, the discussion allows the researchers to obtain in-depth experience in the review process. Moreover, the reviews will also provide, in many cases, additional helpful
feedback to the authors.

Interested in joining? Please, check out the Call for Participitation of EuroSys 2023!