NeTS: Medium: Collaborative Research: Language and Hardware Primitives for Programming the Data Plane in High Speed Networks

NeTS：媒介：协作研究：高速网络中数据平面编程的语言和硬件原语

• 批准号: 1563788
• 负责人: Alvin Cheung
• 金额: $ 20.17万
• 依托单位: University of Washington
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2016-06-01 至 2019-05-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1563788&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: NeTS; Medium; Collaborative; Research; Language

The evolution of network routers and switches has been driven primarily by performance. Recently, thanks in part to the emergence of large datacenter networks, the need for better control over network operations, and the desire for new features, programmability of routers has become as important as performance. In response, researchers and practitioners have developed reconfigurable switching chips with a RISC-inspired pipeline architecture, which provide some programmability through hardware primitives that can be configured into a processing pipeline with software directives. Reconfigurable switches are gaining traction as they perform the same as fixed-function chipsets but with lower area overhead. This project seeks to extend the state-of-the-art by developing higher-level programming abstractions and traffic management algorithms for reconfigurable switches. This project will investigate: 1) a C-like language and an abstract machine representing modern switches, 2) a compiler to convert the transactional specification to the pipelined abstract machine, and a 3) Push-In, First-Out (PIFO) primitive for programmable packet scheduling. This project will make programming high-speed switches easier and more expressive, which will be useful in datacenters, enterprises, and service provider networks. Research findings will be incorporated into the undergraduate and graduate curricula, offering students an opportunity to implement network protocols in C, a familiar language, but run them at hardware speeds. The course material will be made widely available through MIT OpenCourseWare and on the MITx MOOC.

网络路由器和交换机的发展主要由性能驱动。最近，部分由于大型数据中心网络的出现、更好地控制网络操作的需要以及对新功能的渴望，路由器的可编程性变得与性能一样重要。为此，研究人员和从业人员开发了具有 RISC 启发的管道架构的可重构交换芯片，该芯片通过硬件原语提供了一定的可编程性，这些硬件原语可以使用软件指令配置到处理管道中。可重新配置的交换机越来越受欢迎，因为它们的性能与固定功能芯片组相同，但面积开销更低。该项目旨在通过开发用于可重新配置交换机的更高级别的编程抽象和流量管理算法来扩展最先进的技术。该项目将研究：1) 类 C 语言和代表现代交换机的抽象机，2) 将事务规范转换为流水线抽象机的编译器，以及 3) 推入先出 (PIFO) 原语用于可编程数据包调度。该项目将使高速交换机的编程变得更容易、更具表现力，这对于数据中心、企业和服务提供商网络非常有用。研究成果将纳入本科生和研究生课程，为学生提供使用熟悉的 C 语言实现网络协议的机会，但以硬件速度运行。该课程材料将通过 MIT OpenCourseWare 和 MITx MOOC 广泛提供。