Frank Chenxingyu Zhao 赵宸兴宇

I am Chenxingyu (Frank) Zhao, a sixth-year Ph.D. student in Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, advised by Professor Arvind Krishnamurthy. We also work closely with Professor Ming Liu. My research area is networking and systems, with a recent focus on evolving Data Center Interconnects with SmartNICs for cloud and AI infrastructure. Before coming to UW, I received my B.S. in Computer Science (with honors) from Peking University, advised by Professor Tong Yang.

Email: cxyzhao at cs.washington.edu
[CV] [Google Scholar] [GitHub] [LinkedIn]

Publications

Evolving Data Center Interconnects with SmartNIC

• [Backend Scale-Up]
  Efficient and Flexible Datapaths for Fine-Grained Rack-Scale Interconnects with Elastic QP
  Chenxingyu Zhao, Yibo Wu, Hongtao Zhang, Jaehong Min, Ming Liu, Arvind Krishnamurthy
  ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM), 2026 [Slides] [Talk]

• [Frontend Sandbox]
  SG-IOV: Socket-Granular I/O Virtualization for SmartNIC-Based Container Networks
  Chenxingyu Zhao, Hongtao Zhang, Jaehong Min, Shengkai Lin, Wei Zhang, Kaiyuan Zhang, Ming Liu, Arvind Krishnamurthy
  ACM Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), 2026 [Slides]

• [Backend Scale-Out]
  White-Boxing RDMA with Packet-Granular Software Control
  Chenxingyu Zhao, Jaehong Min, Ming Liu, Arvind Krishnamurthy
  USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), 2025 [Slides] [Talk]

Storage with SmartNIC

• LEED: A Low-Power, Fast Persistent Key-Value Store on SmartNIC JBOFs
  Zerui Guo, Hua Zhang, Chenxingyu Zhao, Yuebin Bai, Michael Swift, Ming Liu
  ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM), 2023

• eZNS: An Elastic Zoned Namespace for Commodity ZNS SSDs
  Jaehong Min, Chenxingyu Zhao, Ming Liu, Arvind Krishnamurthy
  USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), 2023

• Dremel: Adaptive Configuration Tuning of RocksDB KV-Store
  Chenxingyu Zhao, Tapan Chugh, Jaehong Min, Ming Liu, Arvind Krishnamurthy
  ACM Special Interest Group on Measurement and Evaluation (SIGMETRICS), 2022 [Talk at Meta]

• Gimbal: Enabling Multi-tenant Storage Disaggregation on SmartNIC JBOFs
  Jaehong Min, Ming Liu, Tapan Chugh, Chenxingyu Zhao, Andrew Wei, In Hwan Doh, Arvind Krishnamurthy
  ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM), 2021

Cloud-Hosted Financial Exchanges with SmartNIC

• DBO: Response Time Fairness for Cloud-Hosted Financial Exchanges
  Prateesh Goyal, Eashan Gupta, Ilias Marinos, Chenxingyu Zhao, Radhika Mittal, Ranveer Chandra
  ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM), 2023

Programmable Switch

• Programmable Calendar Queues for Packet Scheduling
  Naveen Sharma, Chenxingyu Zhao, Ming Liu, Pravein Govindan, Changhoon Kim, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Anirudh Sivaraman
  USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), 2020

• Fast and Accurate Graph Stream Summarization
  Xiangyang Gou, Lei Zou, Chenxingyu Zhao, Tong Yang
  IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), 2019

• DDP: Distributed Network Updates in SDN
  Geng Li, Yichen Qian, Chenxingyu Zhao, Y.Richard Yang, Tong Yang
  IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), 2018

• Single hash: Use one hash function to build faster hash based data structures
  Xiangyang Gou, Chenxingyu Zhao, Tong Yang, Lei Zou, Yang Zhou, Yibo Yan, Xiaoming Li, Bin Cui
  IEEE International Conference on Big Data and Smart Computing (BigComp), 2018

Research Mentoring

• Yibo Wu (2025), Undergraduate at University of Wisconsin → PhD at University of Washington

• Hongtao Zhang (2024), Undergraduate at University of Wisconsin → PhD at University of Washington

• Fenghao Dong (2023), Undergraduate at Peking University → PhD at Carnegie Mellon University

• Yiran Lei (2022), Master at Tsinghua University → PhD at Carnegie Mellon University

• Eric Marnadi (2022), Undergraduate at University of Washington → Databricks

Industry Experience

• Google, Seattle (2026.3~Present)
       Student Researcher, SystemsResearch@Google (SRG)
       Project: Agents & RL

• Microsoft Research, Redmond (2022.6~2022.9)
       Research Intern, Network Research Group and Azure Hardware Architecture (AHA) Group
       Project: Congestion Control

• ByteDance, Remote (2020.5~2020.9)
       Research Intern, Software Defined Networking Team
       Project: Chatbot for Network Diagnosis

Teaching Experience

• CSE 599O: Systems for Buidling Foundation Models, Teaching Assistant (with Prof. Stephanie Wang), 2025 Fall

• CSE 452: Distributed Systems, Teaching Assistant (with Prof. Arvind Krishnamurthy), 2025 Spring