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是由性能驱动的。最近，由于大型数据中心网络的出现，需要更好地控制网络操作，以及对新功能的渴望，路由器的可编程性已经变得和性能一样重要。作为回应，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开关芯片，该芯片通过硬件原语提供了一些可编程性，这些原语可以配置为带有软件指令的处理管道。可重构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。该项目旨在通过为可重构交换机开发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器，2)将事务规范转换为流水线抽象机器的编译器，以及a3)用于可编程数据包调度的Push-In， First-Out （PIFO）原语。该项目将使高速交换机的编程变得更容易和更具表现力，这将在数据中心、企业和服务提供商网络中非常有用。研究成果将被纳入本科和研究生课程，为学生提供一个用C语言（一种熟悉的语言）实现网络协议的机会，但以硬件速度运行。课程材料将通过麻省理工学院开放课程和麻省理工学院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 a3) 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.