by Chang Kim, Vladimir Gurevich, Antonin Bas, Bapi Vinnakota & Sujal Das.
Immediately following the 2nd P4 Workshop on November 18 there were two hands-on P4 events: a P4 Boot Camp for PhD students, hosted by Barefoot Networks, and a P4/C Developers’ Conference (P4DevCon) hosted by Netronome.
P4 Boot Camp on November 19-20, 2015
This was a two-day event where researchers from industry and academia came together to learn, create and share new and interesting P4 programs using the open source development environment, compilers and programs available on P4.org’s GitHub page. This event was oversubscribed with 28 researchers representing 14 universities and research organizations from 6 countries.
You can find the agenda and presentation materials on the P4 Boot Camp page. There were lectures, tutorials and demos showcasing features and capabilities of P4 language. The demos included showing running P4 code for features like In-band Network Telemetry (INT), Flowlet Switching, L4 Load Balancing, etc.
Researchers also got to take part in hands on lab sessions by going through example P4 programs (Source Routing, Flowlet Switching, etc.) and compiling them using the P4 development environment available on P4.org.
There was also a panel discussion with Q&A on day 1 with participants from the industry.
Chang Kim is Director of System Architecture at Barefoot Networks and is working actively at the P4 Language Consortium (P4.org).
Vladimir Gurevich is Technical Leader, Customer Engineering at Barefoot Networks.
Antonin Bas is a Software Engineer at Barefoot Networks.
P4DevCon on November 19, 2015
Netronome Systems held an inaugural P4DevCon conference on Nov. 19th, 2015 at the DoubleTree Hotel in San Jose, CA. The conference was a one-day technical hands-on introduction to P4 and C based programming on Netronome Intelligent Server Adapters and was attended by more than forty researchers from thirty universities and companies in eight countries. The agenda included keynotes from Jennifer Lin, VP at Juniper Networks and Niel Viljoen CEO of Netronome.
The primary component of the agenda was a hands-on lab introduction to P4 and programming Netronome's flow processors in P4 and C. With the labs, attendees built a basic P4 data path in the Netronome Intelligent Server Adapter, followed by a custom tunnel processor in the Adapter, accelerated the tunnel with custom C code and built a "bump-in-the-wire" app entirely in C. The workshop concluded with research presentations from the university attendees.
Netronome also introduced open-nfp.org, a community site that will offer resources to accelerate research in network function processing in servers for applications such as network virtualization, traffic engineering, security, load balancing and telemetry. The recordings of the presentations at the conference and software and tools discussed and utilized at the conference will be available at open-nfp.org.
Sujal Das is a Senior VP Marketing at Netronome with over 20 years of networking industry experience, specializing in data center applications.
Bapi Vinnakota is a Director for Technology and Ecosystem Development at Netronome and focuses on academic outreach.
Feedback
We would love to get your thoughts/feedback on these events. Please send them to us at p4@p4.org - we will use your ideas to help us shape future events.
Thanks to our member companies who hosted these events.
We are very grateful to Barefoot Networks and Netronome for hosting these events. We would like to see a joint hands-on Boot Camp for a wider audience next year.
Thanks again to everyone who attended, spoke, coded and demonstrated. See you at the next P4 hands-on event in 2016.
