In a software-defined network, each switch exports a simple, standard and relatively direct interface to its underlying hardware. These switches are organized and managed by a separate, logically centralized controller machine or cluster of machines. Software-defined networks are growing in popularity throughout industry, particularly as a means to customize network management of high-speed datacenters.
In this talk, we will discuss the Frenetic project, whose goal over the last several years has been to develop new, high-level, declarative, domain-specific languages for programming software-defined networks. In particular, we will discuss several of the core abstractions and programming language features we have developed, what key problems they solve, their formal semantics, and how to compile them to the underlying switch hardware. We will also touch on the next generation of software-defined networks and future opportunities for declarative language design.
David Walker is a Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. He received his B.Sc. from Queen's University (Canada) in 1995 and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University in 2001. At Princeton, he studies programming languages, compilers, type systems, and domain-specific languages. After arriving at Princeton in February 2002, he won an NSF Career award in 2003 and Alfred Sloan Fellowship in 2004. In 2007, with his students and colleagues at Princeton, he won the PLDI best paper award for the paper entitled "Fault-Tolerant Typed Assembly Language." In 2008, his paper "From System F to Typed Assembly Language," co-authored with Greg Morrisett, Karl Crary and Neal Glew, won a 10-year retrospective award for the highest impact POPL 1998 paper. In 2013, with his students and colleagues at Princeton and Cornell, he won the NSDI community award for his paper on "Composing Software-Defined Networks." He is currently serving as an associate editor for the ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and is the Program Chair for POPL 2015.