Course Schedule
Each day’s reading corresponds to the content that will be covered on that day’s class.
| Day | Lecture (Week) | Description | Readings | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8/27 | 1 (1) | Intro | Syllabus | |
| 8/29 | 2 (1) | Programmable Network Hardware | P4: Programming Protocol-Independent Packet Processors and Forwarding Metamorphosis: Fast Programmable Match-Action Processing in Hardware for SDN | Only the P4 paper is required reading. The other paper (Forwarding Metamorphosis) is optional recommended reading. Most of the lecture will focus on Forwarding Metamorphosis. |
| 9/3 | 3 (2) | More Programmable Network Hardware | P4 and RMT again | |
| 9/5 | 4 (2) | Programmable Scheduling | Choose 1 of the following: Programmable Packet Scheduling at Line Rate or Universal Packet Scheduling | A review is only required for one of the two papers on the schedule. |
| 9/10 | 5 (3) | Applied Programmable Networking | Choose 1 of the following: Approximating Fair Queueing on Reconfigurable Switches or Evaluating the Power of Flexible Packet Processing for Network Resource Allocation | A review is only required for one of the two papers on the schedule. |
| 9/12 | 6 (3) | Topology | Choose 1 of the following: Jupiter Rising: A Decade of Clos Topologies and Centralized Control in Google’s Datacenter Network or Minimal Rewiring: Efficient Live Expansion for Clos Data Center Networks | |
| 9/17 | 7 (4) | P4 in practice | ||
| 9/19 | 8 (4) | Intro to RDMA | Using RDMA Efficiently for Key-Value Services | Most of the lecture will focus on the different RDMA transports and verb types |
| 9/24 | 9 (5) | RDMA Design Guidelines | Design Guidelines for High Performance RDMA Systems | |
| 9/26 | 10 (5) | Using RDMA to build distributed systems | FaRM: Fast Remote Memory | |
| 10/1 | 11 (6) | RDMA Limitations | LITE Kernel RDMA Support for Datacenter Applications | |
| 10/3 | 12 (6) | RDMA at Scale | RDMA over Commodity Ethernet at Scale | |
| 10/8 | 13 (7) | Overcoming RDMA’s Limitations | Loom: Flexible and Efficient NIC Packet Scheduling | |
| 10/10 | 14 (7) | Data Center Congestion Control | Data Center TCP (DCTCP) | |
| 10/15 | 15 (8) | More Data Center Transports | Homa: A Receiver-Driven Low-Latency Transport Protocol Using Network Priorities | |
| 10/17 | 16 (8) | Intro to NFV | OpenNF: Enabling Innovation in Network Function Control | Also check out the OpenNF youtube video |
| 10/22 | 17 (9) | Scheduling in NFV | NFVnice: Dynamic Backpressure and Scheduling for NFV Service Chains | |
| 10/24 | 18 (9) | Virtual Networking at Google | Andromeda: Performance, Isolation, and Velocity at Scale in Cloud Network Virtualization | Also see the presentation |
| 10/29 | 19 (10) | Hardware Accelerated Virtual Networking | Azure Accelerated Networking: SmartNICs in the Public Cloud | Also see the presentation |
| 10/31 | 20 (10) | Multi-tenant TCP Isolation | AC/DC TCP: Virtual Congestion Control Enforcement for Datacenter Networks | Seawall is also relevant |
| 11/5 | 21 (11) | Conference Presentation Practice #1 | Three students will give a 20 minute lecture on the paper they chose. | Every paper at NSDI 19, NSDI 18, SIGCOMM 19, and SIGCOMM 18 has slides available for the presentation. For this lecture, you should pick a paper interesting to you in one of these proceedings. For this paper, you should watch the presentation, complete a paper review, and present this work to the class. |
| 11/7 | 22 (11) | Scalable Network Statistics | One Sketch to Rule Them All: Rethinking Network Flow Monitoring with UnivMon | |
| 11/12 | 23 (12) | Conference Presentation Practice #2 | Three students will give a 20 minute lecture on the paper they chose. | Every paper at NSDI 19, NSDI 18, SIGCOMM 19, and SIGCOMM 18 has slides available for the presentation. For this lecture, you should pick a paper interesting to you in one of these proceedings. For this paper, you should watch the presentation, complete a paper review, and present this work to the class. |
| 11/14 | 24 (12) | HotNets 2019 | Watch two presentations (Thursday or Friday) from HotNets 2019 | Program and Live Stream |
| 11/19 | 25 (13) | Network Configuration Verification | Fast Control Plane Analysis Using an Abstract Representation | |
| 11/21 | 26 (13) | Forwarding Table Verification | Choose 1 of the following: Header Space Analysis and Automatic Test Packet Generation | |
| 11/26 | 27 (14) | Packet-Level Load Balancing | Choose 1 of the following: Resilient Datacenter Load Balancing in the Wild and DRILL: Micro Load Balancing forLow-latency Data Center Networks | |
| 11/28 | 28 (14) | Thanksgiving | No class | |
| 12/3 | 29 (15) | NIC Offloading | High Performance Packet Processing with FlexNIC or Floem: A Programming System for NIC-Accelerated Network Applications | FlexNIC Slides and Floem Slides Note that you are not required to review both papers! |
| 12/5 | 30 (15) | Network-Accelerated Coordination | Eris: Coordination-Free Consistent Transactions using Network Multi-Sequencing (Extended Version) |