Mohammad Firas Sada is a researcher at UC San Diego, with a deep focus on high-performance networking, distributed systems, and cutting-edge infrastructure for scientific research. He is involved in advancing the integration of the National Research Platform (NRP) with key testbeds like FABRIC, focusing on the optimization of network architectures to support large-scale scientific workflows. His current research interests revolve around the development and optimization of software-defined networking (SDN) solutions, leveraging FPGA-based experimentation for performance enhancement in complex networking environments. These efforts contribute to advancing the SENSE (Software-Defined Network for End-to-End Networked Science at Exascale) platform, which aims to provide scalable, customizable network services to facilitate high-impact scientific research across multiple domains.

A significant aspect of Mohammad’s work is his involvement with P4 programming on FPGAs. He is dedicated to leveraging P4, a high-level programming language for defining and controlling network behavior, to offload packet processing tasks to FPGAs for higher performance in networking applications. This approach allows for the creation of highly customized network functions, providing a flexible and high-performance solution for experiments involving data-heavy scientific workflows. In addition to his work on NRP and FABRIC, Mohammad has made significant strides in developing and refining the Kubernetes SENSE operator. This operator is designed to automate the deployment, management, and scaling of network services across Kubernetes clusters within the SENSE framework.