Colloquium Details

A New Approach to Network Functions

Speaker: Aurojit Panda, University of California, Berkeley

Location: 60 Fifth Avenue 150

Date: February 24, 2017, 11:30 a.m.

Host: Subhash Khot

Synopsis:

Modern networks do far more than  just deliver packets, and provide network functions -- including  firewalls, caches, and WAN optimizers — that are crucial for scaling networks, ensuring security and enabling new applications.  Network functions were traditionally implemented using dedicated hardware middleboxes, but in recent years they are increasingly being deployed as VMs on commodity servers. While many herald this move towards network function virtualization (NFV) as a great step forward, I argue that accepted virtualization techniques are ill-suited to network functions. In this talk I describe NetBricks — a new approach to building and running virtualized network functions that speeds development and increases performance. I end the talk by discussing the implications of being able to easily create and insert new network functions.

Speaker Bio:

Aurojit Panda is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of California Berkeley, where he is advised by Scott Shenker. His work spans programming languages, networking and systems, and his recent work has investigated network verification, consensus algorithms in software defined networks and frameworks for building network functions.

Notes:

In-person attendance only available to those with active NYU ID cards.


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