Muhammad Shahbaz will present his generals exam on Wednesday, May 11, 2016 at 2:30pm in CS 302 The members of his committee are Nick Feamster (adviser), Jennifer Rexford, and Kyle Jamieson. *Title:* PISCES: A Programmable, Protocol-Independent Software Switch Abstract: Virtualized data centers use software hypervisor switches to steer packets to and from virtual machines (VMs). The switch frequently needs upgrading and customization—to support new protocol headers or encapsulations for tunneling or overlays, to improve measurement and debugging features, and even to add middlebox-like functions. Software switches are typically based on a large body of code, including kernel code. Changing the switch is a formidable undertaking requiring domain mastery of network protocol design and developing, testing, and maintaining a large, complex codebase. In this talk, we will argue that changing how a software switch forwards packets should not require intimate knowledge of its implementation. Instead, it should be possible to specify how packets are processed and forwarded in a high-level domain-specific language (DSL) such as P4, then compiled down to run on the underlying software switch. I will present PISCES, a software switch that is not hard-wired to specific protocols, which eases adding new features. We will also show how the compiler can analyze the high-level specification to optimize forwarding performance. Our evaluation shows that PISCES performs comparably to Open vSwitch, a hardwired hypervisor switch, and that PISCES programs are about 40 times shorter than equivalent Open vSwitch programs. *Reading List:* *Textbook* L. L. Peterson and B. S. Davie. "Computer Networks, Fifth Edition: A Systems Approach." Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, USA, 5th edition, 2011. *Papers* 1. Jose, Lavanya, et al. "Compiling packet programs to reconfigurable switches." NSDI 15. 2. Bosshart, Pat, et al. "P4: Programming protocol-independent packet processors." CCR 14. 3. Song, Haoyu. "Protocol-oblivious forwarding: Unleash the power of SDN through a future-proof forwarding plane." HotSDN 13. 4. Lattner, Chris, and Vikram Adve. "LLVM: A compilation framework for lifelong program analysis & transformation." CGO 04. 5. Adve, Vikram, et al. "LLVA: A low-level virtual instruction set architecture." MICRO 03. 6. Pfaff, Ben, et al. "The design and implementation of open vswitch." NSDI 15. 7. Belay, Adam, et al. "IX: A protected dataplane operating system for high throughput and low latency." OSDI 14. 8. Morris, Robert, et al. "The Click modular router." SOSP 99. 9. McCanne, Steven, and Van Jacobson. "The BSD packet filter: A new architecture for user-level packet capture." USENIX 93. 10. Bosshart, Pat, et al. "Forwarding metamorphosis: Fast programmable match-action processing in hardware for SDN."SIGCOMM 13. 11. Anwer, Muhammad Bilal, et al. "Switchblade: a platform for rapid deployment of network protocols on programmable hardware." SIGCOMM 10. 12. Emmerich, Paul, et al. "MoonGen: A Scriptable High-Speed Packet Generator." IMC 15. 13. Katta, Naga, et al. "HULA: Scalable Load Balancing Using Programmable Data Planes." SOSR 16. 14. Sivaraman, Anirudh, et al. "Towards Programmable Packet Scheduling." HotNets 15. 15. Jeyakumar, Vimalkumar, et al. "Millions of little minions: Using packets for low latency network programming and visibility." SIGCOMM 14.