Career Profile

Systems researcher with a keen interest in high-performance networked computer systems. My research interests lie in the area of host dataplane acceleration including kernel-bypass I/O frameworks, userspace network (TCP/IP, UDP/IP) and storage (NVMe) stacks, RDMA, scheduling, device drivers etc. I have also conducted research in systems security, focussing on hybrid capability systems and compiler-assisted application compartmentalization frameworks.

I completed my PhD at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge in 2018 under the supervision of Robert N.M. Watson and Mark Handley.

Professional Experience

Systems Researcher

August 2024 - Present
NVIDIA
  • Next-gen Programmable NICs, transports for AIML, RPC acceleration.

Senior Researcher

November 2018 - August 2024
Microsoft Research, Networking Research Group, Redmond, USA
  • Design and implementation of ”Delivery Based Ordering” system that provides fairness for high frequency trading in cloud‑hosted financial exchanges.
  • Production‑friendly network stack to accelerate communication in cloud environments; emphasizing in usability (simple message‑based API), deployability (container‑based sidecar) and low‑latency (kernel‑bypass).
  • Compiler-based optimizations for cloud SDN policy rulesets.
  • Over-the-network disaggregation of 5G PHY and MAC layers to enable cloud-native 5G vRANs (workload migration, resilience, elasticity).
  • RDMA (RoCEv2) telemetry for Azure: instrumentation and optimization of custom RDMA‑based storage stacks to implement RDMA telemetry for Azure (RDMA ESTATS).

Software Engineer (Internship)

September 2015 - January 2016
Google, Mountain View, California, USA

Worked on host data plane acceleration for high-performance networking. Used custom kernel-bypass frameworks and built part of a production low-latency userspace packet switching engine and software NIC.

Systems Engineer

November 2009 - May 2011
Bytemobile Inc, (Now part of Citrix)

Lab design and implementation for network performance emulating thousands of clients using load balancers, complex network topologies, opensource and proprietary traffic generators on top of 10GbE hardware. Aslo worked on application and kernel optimizations to scale network performance.

Software Engineer

May 2009 - August 2009
Google Summer of Code (FreeBSD organization)

Designed and implemented a new model for TrustedBSD Audit, that allows multiple audit facilities, supporting new logging mechanisms and attributes (Kernel space implementation & patches to libbsm FreeBSD library). I have extended this project to support a prototype audit subsystem for the FreeBSD jails.

Systems & Network Administrator

June 2007 - June 2008
Bytemobile Inc, (Now part of Citrix)

Responsible for Bytemobile European Development Center’s core IT infrastructure: gateways, dns, policy-based routing, firewalls and other services.

Awards

Fellowship (and funding) to recognize important contributions in systems & networking.

Fellowship and funding to support research on network and storage stack specialization for performance (joint work with Robert N.M. Watson).

Publications

  • Efficient Policy-Rich Rate Enforcement with Phantom Queues
  • Ammar Tahir, Prateesh Goyal, Ilias Marinos, Mike Evans, Radhika Mittal
    ACM SIGCOMM, 2024
  • DBO: Fairness for Cloud-Hosted Financial Exchanges
  • Eashan Gupta, Prateesh Goyal, Ilias Marinos, Chenxingyu Zhao, Radhika Mittal, Ranveer Chandra
    ACM SIGCOMM, 2023
  • Resilient Baseband Processing in Virtualized RANs with Slingshot
  • Nikita Lazarev, Tao Ji, Anuj Kalia, Daehyeok Kim, Ilias Marinos, Francis Y Yan, Christina Delimitrou, Zhiru Zhang, Aditya Akella
    ACM SIGCOMM, 2023
  • Rethinking cloud-hosted financial exchanges for response time fairness
  • Prateesh Goyal, Ilias Marinos, Eashan Gupta, Chaitanya Bandi, Alan Ross, Ranveer Chandra
    ACM HotNETS, 2022
  • Disk|Crypt|Net: rethinking the stack for high-performance video streaming
  • Ilias Marinos, Robert N.M. Watson, Mark Handley, Randall R. Stewart
    ACM SIGCOMM, 2017
  • Clean Application Compartmentalization with SOAAP
  • Khilan Gudka, Robert N.M. Watson, Jonathan Anderson, David Chisnall, Brooks Davis, Ben Laurie, Ilias Marinos, Peter G. Neumann, Alex Richardson
    ACM CCS, 2015
  • Network Stack Specialization for Performance
  • Ilias Marinos, Robert N.M. Watson, Mark Handley
    ACM SIGCOMM, 2014
  • TESLA: temporally enhanced system logic assertions
  • Jonathan Anderson, Robert N.M. Watson, David Chisnall, Khilan Gudka, Ilias Marinos
    EuroSys, 2014
  • Network Stack Specialization for Performance
  • Ilias Marinos, Robert N.M. Watson, Mark Handley
    HotNets-XII, 2014