I am a fifth year CS PhD student at the University of Utah, School of Computing under the supervision of Prof. Ryan Stutsman. I am also collaborating with Prof. Brent Stephens. My research interests are at the intersection of operating systems, networking, and distributed systems. Particularly, my research focuses on enhancing the scalability of modern data centers through the use of emerging hardware and accelerator offloads in the post-Moore era.

Before starting my PhD, I worked with Tanvir Ahmend Khan on load-time code layout optimizations of large application binaries in warehouse scale computers.

I completed my bachelor’s degree from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology.

News

  • [ May 2024 ] I am joining as a research intern in Hewlett Packard Labs.
  • [ October 2023 ] I will present my research work on SmartNIC offloading in SOSP Doctoral Workshop.
  • [ May 2022 ] I will serve on the OSDI’22 artifact evaluation committee.
  • [ September 2021 ] I will serve on the SOSP’21 artifact evaluation committee.
  • [ August 2021 ] Joined in the University of Utah, School of Computing as a CS PhD student.

Publications

Network-accelerated Active Messages
Md Ashfaqur Rahaman, Alireza Sanaee, Todd Thornley, Sebastiano Miano, Gianni Antichi, Brent E Stephens, and Ryan Stutsman.
arXiv, 2025. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.07431

Stop Taking the Scenic Route: the Shortest Distance Between the CPU and the NIC is MMIO
Wei Siew Liew, Md Ashfaqur Rahaman, James McMahon, Ryan Stutsman, and Vijay Nagarajan.
HotOS, 2025. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3713082.3730389

Research

  • A new efficient, secure, and scalable framework for remote memory access and function offloading exploiting the programmability and offloading capability of smartNICs

  • Exploring new Host-NIC interface designs and building systems to enable high-bandwidth and low-latency data movement in modern data center networks.

  • Optimizing the communication infrastructure to support low-latency high-throughput LLM inference

  • SmartNIC offloaded distributed systems.

Services

  • Aftifact evaluation committee, OSDI’22
  • Aftifact evaluation committee, SOSP’21

Teaching Assistantship

  • Distributed Systems, University Of Utah, Fall’22
  • Operating Systems, University Of Utah, Sprint’22