CS Distinguished Speaker Series: Prof. Jennifer Rexford will speak on Friday, March 9 at 11am.
Host: Sharon Goldberg
Title: Enabling Innovation Inside the Network
Abstract: Today’s computer networks perform a bewildering array of tasks, from routing and access control, to traffic monitoring and load balancing. Yet, network administrators must configure the network through closed and proprietary interfaces to heterogeneous devices, such as routers, switches, firewalls, and load balancers. Not surprisingly, configuring these complex networks is expensive and error-prone, and innovation in network management proceeds at a snail’s pace.
During the past several years, the networking industry and research community have pushed for greater openness in networking software, and a clearer separation between networking devices and the software that controls them. This broad trend is known as Software Defined Networking (SDN). A hallmark of SDN is having an open interface for controller software running on a commodity computer to install packet-processing rules in the underlying switches. In particular, many commercial switches support the OpenFlow protocol, and a number of campus, data-center, and backbone networks have deployed the new technology. With the emergence of open interfaces to network devices, the time is ripe to rethink the design of network software, to put the networking field on a stronger foundation and foster innovation in networked services. Yet, while SDN makes it possible to program the network, it does not make it easy. After giving an overview of Software Defined Networking, this talk discusses our Frenetic project that raises the level of abstraction for programming the network. We also outline exciting opportunities for interdisciplinary research at the intersection of programming languages and computer networks.
This is joint work with Nate Foster (Cornell), Dave Walker (Princeton), Rob Harrison (U.S. Military Academy), Chris Monsanto (Princeton), Mark Reitblatt (Cornell), Alec Story (Princeton), Michael Freedman (Princeton), and Josh Reich (Princeton).
Bio: Jennifer Rexford is a Professor in the Computer Science department at Princeton University. From 1996 to 2004, she was a member of the Network Management and Performance department at AT&T Labs—Research. Jennifer is co-author of the book “Web Protocols and Practice” (Addison-Wesley, May 2001). She served as the chair of ACM SIGCOMM from 2003 to 2007. Jennifer received her BSE degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1991, and her MSE and PhD degrees in computer science and electrical engineering from the University of Michigan in 1993 and 1996, respectively. She was the 2004 winner of ACM’s Grace Murray Hopper Award for outstanding young computer professional. Location: Hariri Institute Conference Room Please email Sharon Goldberg if you would like to meet with Jen on Friday.