Networking Systems request for proposals

About

This Research Award is now closed

Networking is fundamental to today’s large scale distributed systems that power the family of Facebook applications that are used by billions of people. At Facebook, we focus on making networking technology more flexible and scalable by rethinking traditional approaches and designs, and collaborating with research and open source communities to develop an ecosystem of open hardware and software.

Over the years, we have developed and shared the details of numerous networking systems such as FBOSS, Robotron, Edge Fabric, Datacenter Fabric, Express Backbone, Open/R, Proxygen, Katran, and many more. To foster further innovation in networking and to deepen our collaboration with academia, Facebook is pleased to invite faculty and graduate students to respond to this call for research proposals pertaining to the aforementioned topics. We anticipate awarding a total of six awards, each in the $50,000 range. Payment will be made to the proposer’s host university as an unrestricted gift.

Networking systems research has a wide range of topics. We would like to take a more focused approach in soliciting interesting projects that can benefit the research community and Facebook, where topics may change from year to year. Specifically, this year, we are interested in proposals that fall into these two categories:

• Improving network efficiency with intelligent control, such as traffic engineering, routing, cache management, and congestion control
• Programmable switches and their applications, such as troubleshooting, hardware acceleration, and new routing protocols

Applicants should submit a proposal detailing what contribution their research is expected to make, how the research domain and Facebook will benefit from the work, project timeline, and a budget overview of how the proposed funding will be used.

Proposals should include

• A summary of the project (2 pages maximum) explaining the area of focus, a description of techniques, any relevant prior work, and a timeline with milestones and expected outcomes
• A draft budget description (1 page) including an approximate cost of the award and explanation of how funds would be spent
• Curriculum Vitae for all project participants
• Organization details including tax information and administrative contact details

Eligibility

• Awards must comply with applicable U.S. and international laws, regulations and policies.
• Applicants must be current full-time faculty at an accredited academic institution that awards research degrees to PhD students.
• Applicants must be the Principal Investigator on any resulting award.

Timing and Dates

• Applications are now closed.
• Notifications will be sent by email to selected applicants by August 2019.