Events Calendar

Nate Foster (Cornell): Language Abstractions for Software-Defined Networks

Speaker: Nate Foster , Cornell

Talk Title: Language Abstractions for Software-Defined Networks

Series: CS Colloquium

Abstract: Modern networks provide a variety of services including routing, traffic monitoring, load balancing, and access control. Unfortunately, the languages used to program today's networks lack modern features -- they are typically defined in terms of hardware-level constructs and lack even rudimentary support for modular programming. As a result, network programs are complicated, hard to reason about, and difficult to maintain.

Frenetic is a new language designed to make it easy to program distributed collections of network routers and switches. It provides a rich collection of declarative constructs that raise the level of abstraction for programmers, allowing them to describe what they want the network to do without specifying how it should be implemented. This talk will describe the design and implementation of the language, focusing especially on support for composition (which allows complicated applications to be decomposed into simple modules) consistent updates (which allow a programmer to gracefully modify the state of the network), as well as a machine-verified compiler (which translates high-level programs down to hardware-level packet processing instructions).

Frenetic (http://www.frenetic-lang.org) is joint work with Arjun Guha (Cornell), Robert Harrison (US Military Academy), Christopher Monsanto (Princeton), Joshua Reich (Princeton), Mark Reitblatt (Cornell), Jennifer Rexford (Princeton), Cole Schlesinger (Princeton), Alec Story (Cornell), and David Walker (Princeton).

Biography: Nate Foster is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. His research focuses on developing language abstractions and tools for building reliable systems. He received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania, an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University, and a BA in Computer Science from Williams College, and was a postdoc at Princeton University. His honors include a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Yahoo! Academic Career Enhancement Award, and the Morris and Dorothy Rubinoff Award.

Host: Ethan Katz-Bassett

Location: GFS 106

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Assistant to CS chair