Mary Hogan will present her FPO "Language Expressiveness Under Extreme Scarcity in Programmable Data Planes" on Thursday, May 9th at 1pm in Friend 125 (and zoom).

Committee: Jen Rexford (advisor), Maria Apostolaki (examiner), Ravi Netravali (examiner), Dave Walker (reader), Shir Landau Feibish (reader)

Title: Language Expressiveness Under Extreme Scarcity in Programmable Data Planes

Abstract: Today's networks must run a vast array of sophisticated applications, and the network devices that implement these applications need to operate at high speeds (100+Gbps) and be flexible enough to adapt applications to changing requirements. Programmable network devices have emerged as a way to customize network functionality, while guaranteeing high-speed processing. Writing applications for programmable devices, however, is notoriously difficult. Deploying these applications often requires tedious optimization of their layout, with programmers manually writing, compiling, and testing an implementation, adjusting the design, and repeating. In my research, I aim to simplify the development process with high-level frameworks that allow programmers to define general, parameterized network algorithms and automatically optimize their various parameters. I will first discuss P4All, an extension of an existing programming language that allows programmers to define elastic data structures that stretch automatically to optimally use available resources. These data structures are defined using symbolic primitives (that parameterize the size and shape of the structure) and objective functions (that quantify the value gained or lost as that shape changes). I will then present Parasol, which extends the ideas of P4All by allowing for much more general parameters, whose optimization is tailored to particular network conditions using a representative traffic trace.