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，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要，以及对新功能的渴望，路由器的可编程性已经变得与性能一样重要。作为回应，研究人员和实践者开发了具有RISC启发的流水线架构的可重构交换芯片，该架构通过硬件原语提供一些可编程性，这些原语可以配置为具有软件指令的处理流水线。可重构交换机的性能与固定功能芯片组相同，但面积开销更低，因此正在获得吸引力。该项目旨在通过为可重构交换机开发更高级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)一种代表现代交换机的类C语言和抽象机；2)一个将事务规范转换为流水线抽象机的编译器；3)用于可编程分组调度的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使用。研究成果将纳入本科生和研究生课程，让学生有机会使用熟悉的C语言实施网络协议，但以硬件速度运行。课程材料将通过麻省理工学院开放式课程软件和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 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.