Pavani Kuppili

Hi there!

My name is Pavani Kuppili, PhD student at the University of Utah, advised by Prof. Robert Ricci. My primary research interests are broadly in the areas of Programmable Networks, Data Center Networking, and Network Measurements. I am actively working on programming Tofino switches and FPGA-SmartNICs using P4. I collaborate with Prof. Michael Zink at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Prof. Miriam Leeser at Northeastern University.
Prior to starting my PhD, I was a Master's student at the University of Utah where I had the opportunity to work with Prof. Ryan Stutsman. I have a Bachelor degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from National Institute of Technology (NIT) Silchar, India.
I have previously worked at Amazon with AWS EC2 team as a Cloud Engineer where I explored hands-on a vast spectrum of AWS Services. Later, I worked as a Systems Development Engineer at Amazon where I was part of the Amazon global websites' Cloud Hosting team.

• Interests:• Programmable Networks • Datacenter Networking • Measurement • SmartNICs • Distrubuted SDNs • Network Offloading ML workloads

• August 2026 - Our work "LatencyLab: A DPDK-Based P4 Pipeline Latency Measurement Framework for FPGA SmartNICs" got accepted at HPEC 2026!
• July 2026 - Excited to receive the N2Women Travel Grant for ACM SIGCOMM 2026!
• June 2026 - Back at UMass Amherst for a third summer internship.
• April 2026 - Joining the AEC OSDI '26 !
• April 2026 - Serving on the AEC CoNEXT '26 !
• April 2026 - I will be serving on the IMC ’26 Shadow TPC!
• November 2025 - Excited to share that I will be serving on the ICPE ’26 Artifact Evaluation Committee!
• May 2025 - Returning to UMass Amherst for a second summer internship.
• November 2024 - Attended ICNP'2024 in Charleroi, Belgium and presented my first poster!
• October 2024 - Awarded IEEE ICNP'24 travel grant from Saint Louis University.
• August 2024 - Our Poster: TopoCloud: Getting Datacenter Network Experiments Into The Right Shape got accepted to ICNP 2024!
• May 2024 - Started summer internship at UMass Amherst. Excited to work on OCT-FPGA and P4 with Prof. Michael Zink!
• April 2024 - Attended EuroSys'2024 in Athens, Greece.
• April 2024 - Awarded travel grant for EuroSys'2024.
• January 2024 - Excited to share that I will be serving on the EuroSys 2024 Shadow Programme Committee!
• August 2023 - Started my PhD at the University of Utah with Prof. Robert Ricci!

I build high-performance, resilient datacenter networks by programming Tofino switch ASICs and FPGA-SmartNICs in P4. I also have a soft spot for very large network logs—digging through them, tweaking measurement knobs, and seeing what the data is trying to confess.
Currently, my research focuses on prototyping and evaluating systems that bypass traditional application performance limits. I do this by offloading critical functions to programmable hardware (like AMD Pensando and NVIDIA BlueField DPUs) using acceleration frameworks such as DPDK, RDMA, and eBPF.
If you’re exploring anything in this space (or have a wild idea that might work), I’m always happy to collaborate.

1. LatencyLab: A DPDK-Based P4 Pipeline Latency Measurement Framework for FPGA SmartNICs
   Pavani Kuppili, Yichen Qian, Suranga Handagala, Mike Zink, Miriam Leeser, Robert Ricci
   HPEC, 2026
   Paper
2. Poster: Topocloud: Getting Datacenter Network Experiments Into the Right Shape
   Pavani Kuppili; Aleksander Maricq; Brent E. Stephens; Ryan Stutsman; Robert Ricci
   ICNP, 2024
   Paper
3. Multi-attached network topology with different routing protocols and stub network resolution in OSPF routing
   Pavani Kuppili; Himanshu Mishra; Ramkumar Karsh
   MCCS, 2018
   Paper
4. Design and Analysis of QoS based Optimized Novel Optical Network Emulator for WDM Technology
   Pavani Kuppili; S. K. Tripathy; P. Puspa Devi
   ICCS, 2019
   Paper

• N2Women Grant, SIGCOMM 2026 — Denver, USA, 2026
• Shadow TPC, IMC 2026 — Karlsruhe, Germany, 2026
• Artifact Evaluation Committee, CoNEXT 2026 — Utrecht, The Netherlands, 2026
• Artifact Evaluation Committee, OSDI 2026 — Seattle, WA, USA, 2026
• Artifact Evaluation Committee, ICPE 2026 — Florence, Italy, 2026
• Travel Grant, ICNP 2024 - Charleroi, Belgium, 2024
• Travel Grant, EuroSys 2024 - Athens, Greece, 2024
• Member ShadowPC, EuroSys 2024 - Athens, Greece, 2024
• Quarter Superstar AWS — Amazon Web Services, India, 2020
• AWS Solutions Architect-Associate — 2020