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Programmable High-Speed Internet Networks

Time: Wed 2022-06-01 11.00

Location: Ka-Sal C, floor 2, KTH Kista

Language: English

Participating: Marco Chiesa

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Network operators have long relied on energy-intensive servers to make networks more programmable, i.e., to support the deployment of new network functionalities without upgrading their hardware equipment. Software-in-Silicon is a recent trend in networking that aims to make networks software-like programmable without sacrificing the performance and energy benefits of silicon devices. Unfortunately, supporting complex and arbitrary functionalities on high-speed programmable silicon network devices has been a cumbersome feat.

In this docent lecture, I will present our 4-year journey toward making future networks both programmable and energy-efficient. I will first provide some background on basic and advanced network functionalities. I will then explain the fundamental challenges in deploying such functionalities on existing programmable hardware. I will finally present a radically new approach based on i) carefully separating responsibilities between end-hosts and network devices and ii) disaggregating network functionalities among heterogeneous devices. I will show that our design realizes several types of network functionalities while achieving up to 30x energy savings.