Open-NFP Announces P4 Summer Webinar Series; Opens Cloud-based Laboratory for Research and Development of SDN and NFV Apps

Bi-weekly webinars to focus on the applications and programming of P4 on intelligent server networking platforms; Cloud-based lab infrastructure enables application development, on-demand tutorials and hands-on labs from any location

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--()--Open-NFP, a worldwide, community-driven organization focused on research and development in datapath offloads and acceleration for SDN and NFV applications, has announced its summer series of webinars focused on P4 programming techniques, applications and usage. The six session series runs from July 13 through September 21, 2016. Registration is open and free for all webinars.

Open-NFP (which stands for Open Network Function Processing) fosters open and free development of server-based networking applications that require hardware-based acceleration to deliver higher performance and efficiency. To enable such development on available and production quality server-based networking platforms without requiring developers to purchase or install any hardware, Open-NFP also announced the creation of a cloud-based infrastructure for server hardware-accelerated P4-based application development. The infrastructure utilizes the Netronome® generally available Integrated development environment (IDE) connected to a pool of servers with Agilio™ intelligent server adapters (ISAs). The IDE supports P4 development tools from the P4 Language Consortium (www.P4.org) and provides extensions for optional C-based programming for sophisticated functions such as stateful processing. Open-NFP’s cloud infrastructure will provide developers and researchers with critical tools to quickly and easily learn, develop, test and debug new SDN and NFV applications-related data plane code on hardware like never before.

“We are pleased to provide our first summer series of online trainings that focus on the P4 and C programming language, as well as a cloud-based infrastructure that can be of service to researchers offering their own P4 and C-based lectures and labs,” said Dr. Bapi Vinnakota, managing director of Open-NFP. “Our educational series of webinars will feature introductory and advanced levels of P4-based topics such as custom tagging, time stamping, NFV and building a network time server. We look forward to working with the academic, industry and research communities to further enhance their programming education and productivity.”

Open-NFP P4 Summer Webinar Series Dates, Topics and Speakers:

  • July 13, 8:00 am PT – “P4 for Custom Identification and Flow Tagging” – Nic Viljoen, Netronome
  • July 27, 8:00 am PT – “Consensus as a Network Service” – Huynh Tu Dang, Italian University of Switzerland
  • August 10, 8:00 am PT – “P4-based VNF and Micro-VNF Chaining for Servers with Intelligent Server Adapters” – David George, Netronome
  • August 24, 8:00 am PT – “P4, eBPF and Linux TC Offload” – Dinan Gunawardena and Jakub Kicinski, Netronome
  • September 7, 8:00 am PT – “Protecting the Privacy of the Network – Using P4 to Prototype and Extend Network Protocols” – Mark Matties, Applied Physics Lab, Johns Hopkins University
  • September 21, 8:00 am PT – “Stacks and Layers: Integrating P4, C, OVS and OpenStack” – Johann Tonsing, Netronome

About the P4 Programming Language

P4 is an open-source declarative language for expressing how packets are processed in the dataplane of a network forwarding element such as a switch, NIC, router or network function appliance. It is based upon an abstract forwarding model consisting of a parser and a set of match-action table resources, divided between ingress and egress.

Supporting Resources

About Open-NFP

Open-NFP.org is a worldwide, community-driven organization that enables open and collaborative research in the area of network function processing in server networking hardware. The organization is designed to serve the growing need from the academic and data center networking communities to conduct cutting-edge research and development in the areas of server-based networking datapath offload and acceleration techniques. Since its introduction in November 2015, Open-NFP has hosted 20 open research and development projects from academia and industry. Relevant software and sample datapath libraries are hosted on GitHub, enabling collaborative development across distributed teams. The organization’s website is designed to be a common repository of open source networking datapath P4/C application code and research papers. For more information please visit www.open-nfp.org.

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Contacts

Open-NFP:
Brian Sparks, +1 408-802-2775
info@open-nfp.org

Contacts

Open-NFP:
Brian Sparks, +1 408-802-2775
info@open-nfp.org