Enabling Application-Specific In-Network Computation for Programmable Data Center Networks

MPhil Thesis Defence


Title: "Enabling Application-Specific In-Network Computation for Programmable 
Data Center Networks"

By

Mr. Ge CHEN


Abstract

With the popularity of Internet applications, data centers have been built at 
an unprecedented scale across the world. Among the applications hosted in data 
centers, some demand ultra low round-trip latency, while others require large 
throughput for bulk data transfers. This imposes stringent requirements on the 
data center network fabrics and protocols. Generally, switches only provide 
forwarding services and have no credit to computation in distributed computing 
frameworks.  The emerging programmable switches enable some computation to be 
offloaded to the switch data plane. In this thesis, we propose P4COM, a first 
attempt to implement MapReduce-like functions in programmable switches. P4COM 
consists of three modules. First, P4COM automatically translates application 
logic to switch data plane programs. Second, P4COM adopts a memory management 
policy to efficiently utilize the limited switch on-chip memory. Third, P4COM 
provides fault- tolerance service to handle packet loss. We have built a system 
prototype of P4COM on a testbed with a Barefoot Tofino switch and multiple 
commodity servers. With a combination of testbed experiments and large-scale 
simulations, we show that P4COM is able to achieve line-rate processing at high 
speed data center network links, and can significantly reduce the data 
shuffling traffic.


Date:  			Friday, 24 July 2020

Time:			2:00pm - 4:00pm

Zoom meeting:		https://hkust.zoom.us/j/9534912643

Committee Members:	Dr. Kai Chen (Supervisor)
  			Prof. Cunsheng Ding (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Xiaojuan Ma


**** ALL are Welcome ****