[Nets-seminars] TODAY, 2 PM: talk by Changhoon Kim (Microsoft Azure Cloud Computing)

[Brad Karp]

A reminder to all of this talk on the state of the art in cloud computing at 2 PM today.

Changhoon Kim, a leading researcher in the design of networks for
the real-world data centers 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.

Talk announcement follows below.

All strongly encouraged to attend!

-Brad, bkarp at cs.ucl.ac.uk

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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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