Prof. Hong Xu and his collaborators received the Community Award from the 23rd USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI’26) for the paper “Offloading Cloud Network Services at Production Scale with SONiC DASH SmartSwitch.” The paper is led by Shaofeng Wu, a final-year Ph.D. student from NetX Lab under the supervision of Prof. Hong Xu, with co-authors from Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Research Asia. The work was one of only four papers selected for the NSDI’26 Community Award.
The paper presents SONiC DASH SmartSwitch, a production-scale cloud network offloading architecture deployed in Microsoft Azure. It redesigns stateful cloud network services with a hardware-friendly DASH pipeline, a unified SmartSwitch architecture, and an open, community-driven development model. At scale, SONiC DASH SmartSwitch achieves 1.53 Tbps throughput, 19.2 million connections per second, and 256 million concurrent connections, while improving power efficiency by about 1.8× and space efficiency by about 2.7× over the previous generation. By combining real-world deployment, high performance, and open-source development through the SONiC/DASH ecosystem, the work advances the next generation of scalable, efficient, and reproducible cloud networking infrastructure.
NSDI is widely regarded as one of the premier and most selective conferences in computer systems and networking. Sponsored by USENIX, NSDI focuses on the design, implementation, and practical evaluation of networked and distributed systems, bringing together leading researchers and practitioners from academia and industry. NSDI’26 was held on May 4–6, 2026, in Renton, Washington, USA. The NSDI Community Award recognizes the best papers whose code and/or datasets are made publicly available to the research community, encouraging openness, transparency, and reproducibility in networked systems research. The award highlights not only the technical contribution of the paper, but also its broader value to the community through open-source impact.
