Dushyant Arora will present his MSE thesis talk on Friday May 3 at 11:30 AM in Room 302 (note room!). The members of his committee are; Jennifer Rexford, advisor and Michael Freedman, reader. Everyone is invited to attend his talk. His abstract follows below. ------------------- PARIS: ProActive Routing in Scalable Data Centers Modern data centers must meet many challenges and expectations: (a) They must scale to a large number of servers, while offering high bisection bandwidth and flexible placement of virtual machines. (b) They must allow tenants to specify network policies and realize it by forwarding traffic through desired sequences of middleboxes. (c) They must allow tenants to bring their own IP address space to the cloud to ease transition of enterprise applications and middlebox configuration. The traditional approach of connecting layer-two pods through a layer-three core constrains VM placement. More recent "flat" designs are more flexible, but have scalability limitations due to flooding/broadcasting or querying directories of VM locations. Rather than reactively learn VM locations, our PARIS architecture has a controller that pre-positions IP forwarding entries in the switches. Switches within a pod have complete information about the VMs beneath them, while each core switch maintains complete forwarding state for part of the address space. PARIS offers network designers the flexibility to choose a topology that meets their latency and bandwidth requirements. PARIS also allows tenants to bring their own IP address space and utilizes lightweight virtualization using Linux containers to offer middlebox service in a manner that truly reflects the pay-as-you go model of cloud computing. It utilizes MPLS label forwarding and aggregation in the network core and uses source routing at the network edge to realize middlebox policies specified by tenants. Finally, we evaluate our prototype implementation built using Openflow-compliant switches and NOX controller.