[talks] REMINDER: Robert MacDavid General Exam Presentation - Tomorrow, Thursday, May 10, 2018 at 12:00 pm, CS302

[Barbara A. Mooring]

Robert MacDavid General Exam Presentation - Thursday, May 10, 2018 at 12:00 pm, CS302

Title: 
Scaling Network Polices in the Fast Path with MACH-4

Abstract:
As network speeds increase, operators desire to push applications like Firewalls, Network Address Translators, and Load Balancers into network hardware for better bandwidth, latency, and aggregation. Emerging programmable switches are accelerating this trend, allowing operators to define their own functions that can run entirely in the hardware fast path. Unfortunately, such modern switches are still severely limited by memory, only capable of storing hundreds of thousands of application rules, where modern applications require tens of millions. In this work we show that, by using intimate knowledge of the programmable switches, centralized applications can be split across multiple switches for little to no performance penalty, allowing applications to scale with the size of the network. We show how application caches in each switch can be updated without software intervention, greatly reducing latency and control-plane load as compared to other caching solutions.

Barbara A. Mooring
Interim Graduate Coordinator
Computer Science Department
Princeton University