Chris Monsanto will present his research seminar/general exam on Friday May 18 at 2PM in Room 302 (note room!). The members of his committee are: David Walker (advisor), Jennifer Rexford, and Moses Charikar. Everyone is invited to attend his talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so. His abstract and reading list follow below. ------------------------- Software-defined networks (SDNs) are a new kind of network architecture in which a controller machine manages a distributed collection of switches by instructing them to install or uninstall packet-forwarding rules and report traffic statistics. The recently formed Open Networking Consortium, whose members include Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, and others, hopes to use this architecture to transform the way that enterprise and data center networks are implemented. We define a high-level, declarative language, called NetCore, for expressing packet-forwarding policies on SDNs. NetCore is expressive, compositional, and has a formal semantics. To ensure that a majority of packets are processed efficiently on switches---instead of on the controller---we present new compilation algorithms for NetCore and couple them with a new run-time system that issues rule installation commands and traffic-statistics queries to switches. Together, the compiler and run-time system generate efficient rules whenever possible and outperform the simple, manual techniques commonly used to program SDNs today. In addition, the algorithms we develop are generic, assuming only that the packet-matching capabilities available on switches satisfy some basic algebraic laws. Overall, we deliver a new design for a high-level network programming language; an improved set of compiler algorithms; a new run-time system for SDN architectures; the first formal semantics and proofs of correctness in this domain; and an implementation and evaluation that demonstrates the performance benefits over traditional manual techniques. Reading list: Types and Programming Languages, Benjamin Pierce Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools, Alfred V. Aho, Ravi Sethi and Jeffrey D. Ullman, chapters 7-10. Nettle: Functional Reactive Programming of OpenFlow Networks. A. Voellmy and P. Hudak. Functional Reactive Animation, Conal Elliott and Paul Hudak. Embedding dynamic dataflow in a call-by-value language. Cooper, et al. An Experimental analysis of Self-Adjusting computation. Acar, et al. OpenFlow: Enabling innovation in campus networks. McKeown, et al. Declarative routing: Extensible routing with declarative queries. Loo, et al. NOX: towards an operating system for networks. Gude, et al. Onix: A distributed control platform for large-scale production networks. Koponen, et al. Flowvisor: A network virtualization layer. Sherwood, et al. Openflow-based server load balancing gone wild. Wang, et al.