Pravein Govindan Kannan

I am a Research Scientist at IBM Research working on Systems and Networking for AI Inference. I am specifically contributing to open-source projects like llm-d, UCCL and NIXL. Previusly, I have contributed to various networking initiatives in observability (netobserv-ebpf-agent) and multi-cloud networking (Clusterlink) and Paraglider Project, an LF project on Cloud networking abstraction with UC Berkeley, Microsoft and Google.

Prior to joining IBM, I was a Research Fellow at CIR Lab under School of Computing, National University of Singapore. I completed my PhD under the guidance of Prof. Chan Mun Choon. My Thesis is 'Improving Network Diagnostics using Programmable Networks'. My Research focussed on Programmable Networks, Software Defined Networking, Network Virtualization and Mobile Communication technologies. 

More on Personal Webite, GitHub, Google Scholar.

Latest News

• Excited to release our open-source project UCCL, May 2025
• Excited to release our open-source project Paraglider, May 2024
• Paper "Flock" accepted at USENIX OSDI 2024
• Speaker at Open Source Summit 2024 - Talk
• Invited talk at ACM Winter School, Dec 2023
• New Blog published on eBPF Observability, Aug 2022
• Invited talk at Microsoft Research India, July 2022
• Invited talk at EECS Symposium at IISC, April 2022
• Featured article at RedHat Blog, April 2022
• Benchmarks on tunnel/encryption made public in arXiv report, March 2022
• Organizer of PerfNA 2022 (Workshop in ACM SIGMETRICS 2022), March 2022
• TPC Member of CoNEXT 2022, March 2022
• Reviewer for Computer Networks Journal, Jan 2022

Awards & Highlghts

• Outstanding Accomplishment award for contributions to llm-d, Dec 2025
• Outstanding Technical Achievent award for Sky lab collaboration, Jul 2025
• Research Accomplishment award for work with Sky computing team at UC Berkeley, Dec 2024
• Outstanding Technical Achievent award for Network Observability contribution to Red Hat Open Shift and IBM SevOne, Jul 2024
• Research Accomplishment award for work on Network Observability, Dec 2023
• Facebook Research Award on Systems & Networking, Sep 2019
• Research Achievement Award at School of Computing, NUS, Aug 2019
• Best Paper Award at ACM SOSR ’19, Apr 2019
• I&E (Innovation/Entrepreneur) Practicum Award at School of Computing, Apr 2017
• Participated in GYSS (Global Young Scientist Summit) 2017 as LO officer of Dr.Vinton Gray Cerf (ACM Turing Award Winner), Jan 2017
• Awarded President Graduate Fellowship in National University of Singapore, Jan 2015
• Honorary mention at ACM ICPC programming contest for securing 13th rank asia-wide, Feb 2008