[Nets-seminars] NOW: George Varghese, UCL CS Distinguished Lecture

[Brad Karp]

Join us in Roberts G08 for George Varghese (SIGCOMM Award winner)’s UCL CS Distinguished Lecture!

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

UCL CS Distinguished Lecture

Speaker:

Professor George Varghese, Microsoft Research/UCLA
https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~varghese/

Title:

From ElectroDA to NDA: Treating Networks like Hardware Circuits

Time and location:

11 AM,  Thursday 14 July
Roberts G08 Lecture Theatre

Abstract:

Surveys reveal that network outages are prevalent, and outages take
hours to resolve, resulting in significant lost revenue. Many bugs are
caused by errors in configuration files which are programmed using
arcane, low-level languages, akin to machine code.  Further, mistakes
are often hunted down using rudimentary tools such as Ping and
Traceroute. We suggest fresh approaches based on verification and
synthesis.

After briefly describing our earlier results on scalably verifying that
the data plane of a network meets reachability specifications, I
describe recent work on verifying the control plane that builds the data
plane.  This can, for instance, allow us detect latent bugs in BGP
routing configurations.  Unlike earlier work by Griffin-Wilfong, and
Gao-Rexford we focus on automated verification of routing protocols.

I will then describe work we have done in synthesis.   I will set the
stage by describing a reconfigurable router architecture called RMT and
an emerging language for programming routers called P4 (that promises to
extend the boundaries of Software Designed Networks). I will then
describe two synthesis efforts for flexible routers, one akin to
register allocation (table layout) and one akin to code generation
(packet transactions).  I will focus especially on code generation and
show that the all-or-nothing compilation required for wire-speed
forwarding requires adapting standard compiler techniques.
These results suggest that concepts from Electronic Design Automation
(EDA) can be leveraged to create what might be termed Network Design
Automation (NDA).   I end by briefly exploring this vision. This is
joint work with collaborators at CMU, MSR, MIT, Stanford, and University
of Washington.

Bio:

George Varghese received his Ph.D. in 1992 from MIT. From 1993-1999, he
was a professor at Washington University, and at UCSD from 1999 to 2013.
He was the Distinguished Visitor in the computer science department at
Stanford University from 2010-2011. He joined Microsoft Research in
2012.    His book "Network Algorithmics" was published in December 2004
by Morgan-Kaufman. In May 2004, he co-founded NetSift, which was
acquired by Cisco Systems in 2005. With colleagues, he has won best
paper awards at SIGCOMM (2014), ANCS (2013), OSDI (2008), PODC (1996),
and the IETF Applied Networking Prize (2013). He has won lifetime awards
in networking from the EE (Kobayashi Award) and CS communities (SIGCOMM)
in 2014.
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