[talks] C Monsanto generals

[Melissa M. Lawson]

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.
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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.