[talks] Talk: Arjun Guha, Monday Nov 30, 1:30pm

[Nicole E. Wagenblast]

Talk 
Arjun Guha, University of Massachusetts, Amherst 
Monday, November 30, 1:30PM 
CITP Conference room, 3rd floor Sherrerd Hall 

A Fast Compiler for NetKAT 

In the past few years, high-level programming languages have played a key role 
in several networking platforms, by providing abstractions that streamline 
application development. Unfortunately, current compilers can take tens of 
minutes to generate forwarding state for even relatively small networks. This 
forces programmers to either work around performance issues or revert to using 
lower-level APIs. 

In this talk, we first present a new compiler for NetKAT (a network programming 
language) that is two orders of magnitude faster than existing systems. Our key 
insight is a new intermediate representation based on a variant of binary 
decision diagrams that can represent network programs compactly and supports 
fast, algebraic manipulation. We argue that our compiler scales to large 
networks using a diverse set of benchmarks. 

In addition to speed, our new intermediate representation lets us build a 
powerful new abstraction for network programming. Existing languages provide 
constructs for programming individual switches, which forces programmers to 
specify whole-network behavior on a switch-by-switch basis. For the first time, 
we can compile programs that syntactically represent sets of end-to-end paths 
through the network. To do so, our compiler automatically inserts stateful 
operations (e.g., VLAN tagging) to distinguish overlapping paths from each 
other. 

Finally, we present a very general implementation of network virtualization that 
leverages our ability to compile end-to-end paths. The key insight is to give 
packets two locations--physical and virtual--and synthesize a program that moves 
packets along physical paths to account for hops in the virtual network. We show 
that different synthesis strategies can be used to implement global 
requirements, such as shortest paths, load-balancing, and so on. 

Arjun Guha is an assistant professor of Computer Science at UMass Amherst. He 
enjoys tackling problems in systems using the tools and principles of 
programming languages. Apart from network programming, he has worked on Web 
security and system configuration languages. He received a PhD in Computer 
Science from Brown University in 2012 and a BA in Computer Science from Grinnell 
College in 2006. 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.cs.princeton.edu/pipermail/talks/attachments/20151125/d4eb212f/attachment.html>