OVERVIEW

The Network Programming Initiative (NPI) conducts annual Retreats to bring together faculty, students, postdocs, and industry partners for a one-day workshop with presentations, panels, and informal discussions related to network programming. Topics include practical use cases and solutions encompassing languages, algorithms and tools.

The Fall 2019 Retreat was held on Friday, October 11, 2019 in the Tata Innovation Center at the Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island.

Larry Peterson (above) presents the keynote “Democratizing the Network Edge.” Larry is CTO of the Open Networking Foundation and the Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science, Emeritus at Princeton University, where he served as Chair from 2003-2009. Professor Peterson is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE, the 2010 recipient of the IEEE Kobayashi Computer and Communication Award, and the 2013 recipient of the ACM SIGCOMM Award.

Professor Nate Foster (below), Cornell and NPI Co-Director opens the Retreat with an update on NPI activities and introductions of new additions to the NPI faculty.

Above, NPI co-director Prof. Jen Rexford meets with invited guests from the telecom industry during the morning break. At far left in the photo is Akhil Gokul (Ericsson), and moving clockwise around the table, Larry Petersen (ONF), Ken Duell (AT&T), Raquel Morera (Verizon) and Jen Rexford.

Below, Retreat attendees chat during the Reception at the end of the day.

PROGRAM

8:00am Registration and Breakfast

9:00am Welcome

Nate Foster (Cornell) and Jennifer Rexford (Princeton)

9:30am Keynote: Democratizing the Network Edge

Larry Peterson (Princeton / Open Networking Foundation)

10:30am Coffee

11:00am Telemetry and Monitoring

11:45am Lightning Talks I

  • Enabling Parametrized Description of Data-Plane Algorithms - Mary Hogan (Princeton)
  • Composing Data Plane Programs with μP4 - Hardik Soni (Cornell)
  • Compact Control Flow Encoding in P4 - Suriya Kodeswaran (Princeton)

12:00pm Lunch

1:30pm Lightning Talks II

  • Type-Safe Data Plane Programming with SafeP4 - Eric Campbell (Cornell)
  • Adaptive Traffic Splitting using Programmable Dataplanes - Praveen Tammana (Princeton)
  • DCACP: Data Center Admission Control Protocol - Qizhe Cai (Cornell)

1:45pm Performance

  • Transport Design for High-Speed Datacenter Networks - Rachit Agarwal (Cornell)
  • PicNIC: Predictable Virtualized NIC - Praveen Kumar (Cornell)
  • Discussion moderated by Anirudh Sivaraman (NYU)

2:45pm Data Plane Verification

  • Petr4: Formal Foundations for P4 - Ryan Doenges (Cornell)
  • Fast Data Plane Verification with GKAT - Nate Foster (Cornell)
  • Proof-Carrying Network Code - Minseok Kwon (RIT)
  • Discussion moderated by Yiu Lee (Comcast)

3:30pm Coffee

4:00pm Short Talk

  • Fast, Scalable, and Programmable Packet Scheduler in Hardware - Vishal Shrivastav (Cornell)

4:15pm Control Plane Verification

  • NV: An intermediate language for control plane verification - Nick Giannarakis (Princeton)
  • Abstract Interpretation of Distributed Control Planes - Aarti Gupta (Princeton)
  • Discussion mderated by Vignesh Ramamurthy (InfoSys)

5:00pm Wrapup and Next Steps

Nate Foster (Cornell) and Jennifer Rexford (Princeton)

5:15pm Reception