Programming Line-Rate Routers

A Google TechTalk, 10/5/16, Presented by Anirudh Sivaraman ABSTRACT: The evolution of network routers and switches has been driven primarily by performance. Recently, thanks in part to the emergence of large data centers, the need for better control over network operations, and the desire for new features, programmability of switches has become as important as performance. In response, researchers and practitioners have developed reconfigurable switching chips that are performance-competitive with line-rate fixed-function switching chips. These chips provide some programmability through restricted hardware primitives that can be configured with software directives. This talk will focus on two abstractions for programming such chips. The first abstraction, packet transactions, lets programmers express packet processing in an imperative language under the illusion that the switch processes exactly one packet at a time. A compiler then translates this sequential programmer view into a pipelined implementation on a switching chip that processes multiple packets concurrently. The second abstraction, a push-in first-out queue, allows programmers to program new scheduling algorithms using a priority queue coupled with a program to compute each packet's priority in the priority queue. For the first time, these two abstractions allow us to program several packet-processing functions at line rate. These packet-processing functions include in-network congestion control, active queue management, data-plane load balancing, network measurement, and packet scheduling. This talk includes joint work with collaborators at MIT, Barefoot Networks, Cisco Systems, Microsoft Research, Stanford, and University of Washington. SPEAKER BIO: Anirudh Sivaraman is a PhD student at MIT working in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Before coming to MIT, he was an undergraduate in the Computer Science and Engineering department at IIT Madras and graduated with a BTech in 2010. http://web.mit.edu/anirudh/www/