Invited speakers
Luigi Rizzo
Università di PisaTitle: Building efficient network dataplanes in software
Abstract In this talk we give a survey of solutions -- and especially, discuss
the underlying design principles -- that we developed in recent
years to achieve extremely high packet processing rates in commodity
operating systems, for both bare metal and virtual machines.
By using simple abstractions, and resisting the temptation to design
systems around performant but constraining assumptions, we have
been able to build a very flexible framework that addresses the
speed and latency communication requirements of both bare metal and
virtual machines up to the 100 Gbit/s range. Our goal is not to
provide the fastest framework in the universe, but one that is easy
to use and rich of features (and still, amazingly fast), thus taking
away concerns on the dataplane's speed from (reasonable) network
applications.
Our NETMAP framework, opensource and BSD licensed, runs on 3 OSes
(FreeBSD, Linux, Windows); provides access to NICs, host stack,
virtual switches and point-to-point channels (netmap pipes),
running between 20 and over 100Mpps on software ports, and
saturating NICs with just a single core (reported up to 45 Mpps on
recent 40G nics); achieves bare-metal speed on VMs thanks to
a virtual passthrough mode (available for Qemu and bhyve);
and can be used with no modifications by libpcap clients.
Luigi Rizzo is an associate professor at the Università di Pisa.
He has worked on network emulation, high performance networking,
packet scheduling, multicast and reliable multicast. He is a long
time contributor to FreeBSD, for which he has developed several
subsystems including the dummynet network emulator, the ipfw firewall,
and the netmap framework. He has been program committe member for
for sigcomm, conext, infocom, nsdi, Usenix ATC, ANCS and other
conferences, as well as PC chair for Sigcomm 2009 and Conext 2014,
ANCS 2016, and general chair for Sigcomm 2006. Luigi has been
a frequent visiting researcher at various institutions including
ICSI/UC Berkeley, Google Mountain View, Intel Research Cambridge,
Intel Research Berkeley.
Dimitri Papadimitriou
Nokia Bell Labs, BelgiumTitle: Towards Information-driven Networks: Research Challenges and Perspectives
Abstract The functionality of the Internet has been since more than 30 years mainly confined to destination-based packet routing (reachability function) along logical communication channels identified by their (destination) address / network locator (connectivity function). However, this shared infrastructure is mainly used nowadays for information exchanges (distribution function) whilst data access remains invariably coupled to the communication channel, in particular, its location and identification. To better accommodate the distribution/exchange of information while accounting for its inherent dynamic and uncertainty, the overlay, the peer-to-peer and the named-data routing model have been/are under investigation.
In this talk, we identify their potentials and limits but also the lessons learned from past experience in designing such models. Taking a complex systems perspective, this talk proposes then new routing paradigms and schemes that account for the distributional properties of information/data objects, and the evaluation of their performance. Knowing that the user utility would be mainly driven by information-related criteria and metrics, the main challenge becomes whether one can combine the maximization of its utility function with the minimization of the network-related cost? The problem space does not limit however to the optimization of resource consumption/costs or user utility function. It involves a functional transformation that was not technologically possible at the first stage of the Internet development when the TCP/IP communication stack had been elaborated. From this perspective, information-driven networking questions more the design of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and its association to the logical communication channels it emulates rather than the (application-level) data segmentation it provides. Many challenges remain thus to be addressed along this evolution, in particular, concerning the forwarding plane and its scaling properties. In this respect, information-driven networking opens a fundamental question: beyond circuit- and packet- switching, which forwarding paradigm fits best information exchanges?
Dimitri Papadimitriou started at Alcatel in 2000 where he worked on multi-layer traffic-engineering research for the Corporate Research Center. In 2003, he joined the Research & Innovation Department dedicated to network distributed control and routing algorithmic. Since 2007, he works as Senior Researcher at Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs (Nokia Bell Labs since 2016) and currently in the Network Algorithmic Analytics Control and Security Research Lab. His research interests include network optimization, optimization under uncertainty, and computational intelligence. He authored numerous peer reviewed papers on distributed/dynamic routing, resilience, performance of multi-layer networks, and network optimization. He led several EU FP7 research projects over last ten years.