[talks] R Harrison MSE thesis talk

[Melissa Lawson]

Rob Harrison will present his MSE thesis talk on Friday April 29 at 10AM in Room 402. 
Jen Rexford is his advisor, and David Walker is his reader.  Everyone is invited to 
attend his talk.  His abstract follows below.
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ABSTRACT:

Network administrators must configure network devices to simultaneously provide several interrelated services such as routing, load balancing, traffic monitoring, and access control. Unfortunately, most interfaces for programming networks are defined at the low level of abstraction supported by the underlying hardware, leading to complicated programs with subtle bugs. We present Frenetic, a high-level language for programming networks that enables writing programs in a declarative and compositional style, with a simple ``program like you see every packet'' abstraction. Frenetic consists of a rich network query language, a network management library, and a run-time system. The run-time system efficiently manages the low-level details of installing, uninstalling, and querying the low-level packet-processing rules on physical switches. We describe the design of the Frenetic language and run-time system, an implementation on top of the OpenFlow architecture, experiments and example programs that validate our design choices.