Welcome to Tom Barbette, new Faculty member in ICTEAM !
Tom Barbette obtained his PhD at the University of Liege in 2018, followed by a 3-year postdoc at KTH in Sweden. He joined the ICTEAM one year ago to pursue a second postdoc with Olivier Bonaventure, which he interrupted to join us as Assistant Professor.
Tom has been working on high-speed packet processing to enable lightning in-network processing and provide responsive Internet services. To sustain packet rates at the nanosecond scale, avoiding inter-core communications and careful low-level considerations are of the essence. He is an author and maintainer of FastClick, an open-source project to prototype software network functions like firewalls, intrusion detection systems or load balancers scaling beyond 100Gbps link speeds. On top of software pipeline optimizations, he published multiple papers in the topics of intra-server and inter-server load-balancing techniques to exploit the full potential of modern hardware and maximize datacenter efficiency.
He will be working on designing, implementing and validating a new but backward-compatible network architecture based on the novel programmable network infrastructure, such as SmartNICs and P4-enabled switches. This architecture will enable low-latency communication, building upon future networks to enable datacenter and host disaggregation to factorize resources and reduce the carbon footprint of the digital industry.