[Nets-seminars] Talk by Changhoon Kim (Microsoft Windows Azure), 26 Mar

[Brad Karp]

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Greetings, everyone.

Changhoon Kim, a leading researcher in the design of networks for the
real-world data centers so essential to modern cloud computing, will
be visiting UCL CS and giving a talk at 2 PM on Wednesday the 26th of
March.

Changhoon has had success in bridging between academic computer
networking research and practice in industry. His talk should offer a
rare look into the hard technical problems faced in real-world,
large-scale data centers and the new ideas that solve them.

All strongly encouraged to attend!

Talk announcement follows below.

See you there,
- -Brad, bkarp at cs.ucl.ac.uk

- ---

UCL CS Seminar

Speaker:        Changhoon Kim (Microsoft)
                http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/chakim/

Time and place: 2 PM, Wed 26 Mar, MPEB 1.03

Title:          Network Virtualization for Large Data Centers

Abstract:

Data centers are the digital-era analogue of factories and have become
a vital infrastructure of online service providers and
enterprises. The golden rule of designing and operating a data center
is maximizing the amount of useful work per dollar spent. To meet this
goal, the most desirable technical feature is agility--the ability to
assign any computing resources to any tenants any time. Anything less
inevitably results in stranded resources and poor performance
perceived by data-center users.

In this talk, I first show why conventional networks specifically
designed for large data centers inhibit, rather than facilitate,
agility. Location-dependent addressing, huge and unpredictable
performance variances, and poor data- and control-plane scalability
are the main culprits. Then I put forward network virtualization as a
key architectural principle that eliminates all these constraints in
the first place, hence ensuring agility at scale. The gist of my
network virtualization architecture is a huge-switch abstraction: an
imaginary switch that can host as many servers as customers ask for,
offers predictably and uniformly high capacity between any servers
under any traffic patterns, and yet appears to be dedicated to each
individual customer. With this clean, familiar, and yet powerful
abstraction, datacenter providers and tenants can simply stop worrying
about any performance, reachability, isolation, and addressing
problems that can happen in a shared network hosting various
unpredictable and even hostile workloads.  Then I explain how I turn
this high-level abstraction into an operational system that
virtualizes mega data-center networks running real-world cloud
services. In particular, I show how my specific designs uniquely take
advantage of a few critical opportunities and recent technical trends
that have become available in data centers, ranging from the power of
a software switch present in every hypervisor, to the principle of
separating network state from host state, and to the availability of
commodity networking chips.

Bio:

Changhoon Kim works at Windows Azure, Microsoft's cloud-service
division, and leads research and engineering projects on the
architecture, performance, management, and operation of datacenter and
enterprise networks. His research themes span network virtualization,
big-data processing platform, programmable networks, self-configuring
networks, and debugging and diagnosis of large-scale distributed
systems. Changhoon received Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2009,
where he worked with Prof. Jennifer Rexford. Many of his research
outcomes (including SEATTLE, VL2, VNet, Seawall, EyeQ, and the
relay-routing technology for VPNs) are either directly adopted by
production service providers or under review by standard bodies, such
as IETF. In particular, his VL2 work was published in the Research
Highlights section of the Communications of the ACM (CACM) as an
invited paper, which the editors recognize as "one of the most
important research results published in CS in recent years". He is the
recipient of Rockstar Award 2013, an annual recognition for the
strongest individual networking contributions Microsoft-wide.
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