PhD · NC State '23 · Storage @ HPE

Hassan Iqbal.

Systems software engineer at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, building scale-out storage platform — file system internals, NFSv4 locking and POSIX semantics, and S3 object storage. My research background spans networked systems, cloud performance measurement, and applied machine learning, with a focus on the quality of experience of streaming applications and the performance of public-cloud infrastructure.

Portrait of Hassan Iqbal
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§ 01 / About

A short biography.

I completed my PhD in 2023 in the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University, advised by Prof. Muhammad Shahzad. Before NC State, I earned an MSc in Electrical Engineering (Networks) from LUMS and a BSc in Telecommunication Engineering from NUCES, Lahore.

Today I'm a Software Engineer (Systems III) in HPE's storage business unit, where I've helped build a software-defined, scale-out file and object storage platform from before its 1.0 release through five major releases — designing the server-side locking that backs NFSv4 client locks, implementing core POSIX file operations and mode permissions, and delivering S3 object versioning and locking. My academic work has been recognized at venues including ACM WWW, SIGCHI, SIGMETRICS, CoNEXT, SenSys, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, and the IETF — and one paper made its way into a U.S. Senate bill.

PhD '23
NC State University
Computer Science
MSc
LUMS
Electrical Engineering — Networks
BSc
NUCES Lahore
Telecommunication Engineering
§ 02 / Research & Engineering

Three thrusts.

01
Engineering · HPE

Distributed storage internals — file & object.

Server-side NFSv4 locking and IO range locks, POSIX-conformant operations and permissions, S3 versioning and object locking — the concurrency and correctness machinery of a petabyte-scale platform.

02
Measurement

Quality of experience & performance characterization at cloud scale.

Empirical analyses of video and game-streaming applications, plus the global network infrastructure of public clouds — measurements that turn vague performance complaints into data you can act on.

03
Systems

Application- and transport-layer mechanisms, augmented by deep learning.

Protocol-level interventions — informed by what the measurements actually say — to improve the experience of streaming applications running in the cloud.

§ 03 / Selected Papers

Peer-reviewed publications.

  1. 2026 IETF · Standard New

    RFC 9944: Device Schema Extensions to the System for Cross-Domain Identity Management (SCIM) Model

    Muhammad Shahzad, Hassan Iqbal, Eliot Lear

    IETF RFC Editor — Published May 2026, Standards Track

    RFC 9944 ↗
  2. 2022Conference

    RMS: Removing Barriers to Analyze the Availability and Surge Pricing of Ridesharing Services

    Hassan Ali Khan, Hassan Iqbal, Muhammad Shahzad, Guoliang Jin

    ACM SIGCHI 2022

    DOI GitHub RMSTool
  3. 2022Conference

    Dissecting Cloud Gaming Performance with DECAF

    Hassan Iqbal, Ayesha Khalid, Muhammad Shahzad

    ACM SIGMETRICS 2022

    Abstract DOI Paper DOI GitHub
  4. 2022Journal

    Characterizing the Availability and Latency in AWS Network from the Perspective of Tenants

    Hassan Iqbal, Anand Singh, Muhammad Shahzad

    IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking — Impact factor 3.56 at acceptance

    DOI GitHub Hugging Face Dataset
  5. 2018Conference

    Scylla: Interleaving Multiple IoT Stacks on a Single Radio

    Hassan Iqbal, Hamad Alizai, Ihsan Ayyub Qazi, Olaf Landsiedel, Zartash Afzal Uzmi

    ACM CoNEXT 2018 — Acceptance rate 17%

    DOI PDF
  6. 2017Conference

    Taming Link-layer Heterogeneity in IoT through Interleaving Multiple Link-Layers over a Single Radio

    Hassan Iqbal, Muhammad Hamad Alizai, Zartash Afzal Uzmi, Olaf Landsiedel

    ACM SenSys 2017 — Acceptance rate 17.2%

    DOI PDF
§ 04 / Updates

Recent news.

§ 05 / Service

Teaching, mentorship & service.

Teaching assistant.

  • CSC/ECE 573 — Internet Protocols, Spring 2020
  • CSC/ECE 573 — Internet Protocols, Fall 2018

Academic service.

  • Mentored two undergraduates on convolutional neural networks & transfer learning — GEARS Summer 2021
  • Mentored two undergraduates on high-accuracy video timestamping — GEARS Summer 2021
  • Mentored two undergraduates on web application algorithm analysis — GEARS Summer 2020
  • Mentored two undergraduates on cloud-application performance evaluation — Spring 2020
  • Reviewer — IFIP Networking 2020
  • Reviewer — IEEE Access
§ 06 / Recognition

Honors & awards.

  • NSF Travel Grant — ACM CoNEXT, 2018
  • NCSU Student Travel Grant — ACM IMC, 2018
  • College of Engineering Graduate Merit Award — NCSU, 2018
  • Graduate School Scholarship — fully-funded PhD at NC State University
  • DAAD Summer Research Exchange Grant — 2017
§ 07 / Writing

From the blog.

Medium · Essay

How to apply for a Ph.D. in the USA

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