Shawn Shuoshuo Chen | ETH Zurich, AMD

I have completed my PhD in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where I was co-advised by Srinivasan Seshan and Peter Steenkiste. My research aims to deliver scalable, cost- and power-efficient connectivity to networked systems. Most recently, I have been working on data center networks, optical networks, and machine learning systems.

Prior to CMU, I was a technical lead on Google’s Network Infrastructure team. I built Google’s Jupiter fabric and its SDN controller Orion.

I received my masters degree in computer engineering from University of Virginia, and a bachelor in electrical engineering from Wuhan University.

Publications

Toward Co-adapting Machine Learning Job Shape and Cluster Topology
Shawn Shuoshuo Chen, Daiyaan Arfeen, Minlan Yu, Peter Steenkiste, Srinivasan Seshan
[preprint]
Balancing SDN Control Plane Availability and Traffic Engineering Efficiency in Data Centers
Brian Chang, Keqiang He, Shawn Shuoshuo Chen, Jiaxin Lin, Mingyang Zhang, Wenfei Wu, Aditya Akella
ICNP 2024
[abstract] [paper]
Precise Data Center Traffic Engineering with Constrained Hardware Resources
Shawn Shuoshuo Chen, Keqiang He, Rui Wang, Srinivasan Seshan, Peter Steenkiste
NSDI 2024
[abstract] [paper] [code] [talk]
Zero Buffer Optical Packet Switching Data Center Network
Shawn Shuoshuo Chen, Weiyang Wang, Manya Ghobadi, Srinivasan Seshan, Peter Steenkiste
NSDI 2024 poster
[poster]
Time-division TCP for reconfigurable data center networks
Shawn Shuoshuo Chen, Weiyang Wang, Christopher Canel, Srinivasan Seshan, Alex C. Snoeren, Peter Steenkiste
SIGCOMM 2022
[abstract] [paper] [code] [talk]
Orion: Google’s Software-Defined Networking Control Plane
Andrew D. Ferguson, Steve Gribble, Chi-Yao Hong, Charles Killian, Waqar Mohsin, Henrik Muehe, Joon Ong, Leon Poutievski, Arjun Singh, Lorenzo Vicisano, Richard Alimi, Shawn Shuoshuo Chen, Mike Conley, Subhasree Mandal, Karthik Nagaraj, Kondapa Naidu Bollineni, Amr Sabaa, Shidong Zhang, Min Zhu, and Amin Vahdat
NSDI 2021
[abstract] [paper]
Advances in Reliable File-Stream Multicasting over Multi-Domain Software Defined Networks (SDN)
Yuanlong Tan, Shuoshuo Chen, Steve Emmerson, Yizhe Zhang, Malathi Veeraraghavan
ICCCN 2019
[abstract] [paper]
A Cross-Layer Multicast-Push Unicast-Pull (MPUP) Architecture for Reliable File-Stream Distribution
Shuoshuo Chen, Xiang Ji, Malathi Veeraraghavan, Steve Emmerson, Joseph Slezak, Steven G. Decker
COMPSAC 2016
[abstract] [paper]

Collaborators

I am very fortunate to work with many great people:

Awards and Membership

Argonne Leadership Computing Facility Director’s Discretionary award (2025)
Google Cloud Research Credits (2025)
Lambda Research Grant (2025)
CMU Provost / Graduate Student Assembly funding award (2025)
NYU Henry M. MacCracken Fellowship [declined] (2020)
Google Silver Perfy Award (2019)
Academic Excellence Award Nomination, University of Virginia (2016)
OpenHW Vivado HLS Contest Runner-up, Xilinx (2014)
Outstanding Undergraduate Capstone Project, Wuhan University (2014)
ACM Member/ACM@CMU Member

Service

Review - IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, IEEE GLOBECOM’24
External review - HotNets’23, NSDI’23, NSDI’22
Artifact evaluation committee - SIGCOMM’24, CoNEXT’24, SIGCOMM’23, CoNEXT’23, OSDI/ATC’22

Fun Stuff

I like scuba diving and rock climbing.
I built a 4-node FPGA Bitcoin miner which costs more in power than its profit. :)