7th SDN Workshop

Dear Networkers,

We are happy to announce our 7th SDN workshop, on 8th of Dec 2016 at SWITCH, Zurich.

The agenda for the day is:

14:00 to 14:15 - Doors open & welcome

14:15 to 14:45 - Whippersnapper: A P4 Language Benchmark Suite, by Tu Dang, University of Lugano

14:50 to 15: 20 - zMon: Online IPS in Endeavour SDN, by Akos Mate, IBM Research Lab

15:25 to 15:55 - Gotthard: Network Support for Geo-distributed Transaction Processing, by Theodore Jepsen, University of Lugano

16:00 to 16:30 - Cilium – BPF & XDP for containers, Thomas Graf, Cisco

16:30 to 17:00 - Discussion and planning of future SDN workshop

Abstracts:

1. Whippersnapper: A P4 Language Benchmark Suite - P4, the data plane programming language, has quickly gained the attention of the networking community. There are several efforts underway to develop compilers targeting different hardware platforms, including softwares switches, FPGAs, NPUs, and ASICs. Until now, the standard for evaluation of these tools has simply been “it exists”. However, as P4 moves toward greater maturity, there is a need for a common evaluation criteria. We propose Whippersnapper, a benchmark suite for P4, that evaluates key language features. The benchmark not only provides a vehicle for comparing implementations and designs, but also generates interesting discussion about the language requirements and optimizations.

2. zMon: Online IPS in Endeavour SDN - The scale, speed and sophistication of network attacks are exponentially increasing beyond today's capabilities of established Intrusion Detection/Prevention Systems (IDS/IPS). Indeed, intrusions and DoS attacks are no longer "anomalies", but permanent and evolving fixtures of Internet and Datacenter/Cloud-based IT. Furthermore, mobile and IoT devices are adding monthly millions of potential new bots to attackers' arsenals. This talk presents an online 100Gbps IDS/IPS system capable of (i) globally mirroring all the ports of a Tbps-class SDN switch (Intel RRC FM10K), (ii) detecting dDoS attacks, and (iii) mitigating the latter with a sub-ms reaction time (400us). Effectively such an SDN IDS/IPS method can detect and combat dDoS attacks in near-real-time, as demonstrated by a live zMon demo.

3. Gotthard: Network Support for Geo-distributed Transaction Processing - This talk presents a new technique, called optimistic abort, which reduces network latency and improves throughput for high-contention, write-heavy workloads by identifying transactions that will abort as early as possible, and aborting them before they reach the backend store. We have implemented optimistic abort in a system called Gotthard, which leverages P4 and network data plane programmability to execute transaction processing logic directly in network devices. If Gotthard suspects that a transaction is likely to be aborted at the store, it aborts the transaction early by re-writing the packet header, and routing the packets back to the client.

4. Cilium – BPF & XDP for containers - We present a new open source project which provides IPv6 & IPv4 networking for Linux Containers by generating programs for each individual container on the fly and then runs them as JITed BPF code in the kernel. By generating and compiling the code, the program is reduced to the minimally required feature set and then heavily optimised by the compiler as parameters become plain variables. The upcoming addition of the Express Data Plane (XDP) to the kernel will make this approach even more efficient as the programs will get invoked directly from the network driver.

Register now!

Kind regards,

The Organisers