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

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，对网络操作的更好控制的需求以及对新功能的需求，路由器的可编程性已经变得与性能一样重要。作为回应，研究人员和实践者已经开发出具有RISC启发的流水线架构的可重新配置的交换芯片，其通过硬件原语提供一些可编程性，这些硬件原语可以被配置到具有软件指令的处理流水线中。可重新配置的交换机正在获得牵引力，因为它们与固定功能芯片组一样，但面积开销更低。该项目旨在通过开发可重构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。该项目将调查：1）类C语言和表示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）用于可编程分组调度的推入先出（PIFO）原语。该项目将使高速交换机的编程更容易，更有表现力，这将是有用的电信中心，企业和服务提供商的网络。研究结果将被纳入本科和研究生课程，为学生提供一个机会，实现网络协议在C语言，一个熟悉的语言，但运行它们在硬件速度。课程材料将通过麻省理工学院开放式课程和MITx MOOC广泛提供。

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.