The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Leveraging Programmable Switches for In-network Computing The network line rate is constantly on the rise to support the exploding amounts of data. This means that we have less time to process individual packets, despite a growing demand for better network telemetry. Moreover, CPU speeds are not rising at the same rate as we near the end of Moore’s law, making it harder to rely on software computations. Programmable hardware switches are an emerging technology that enables flexible packet processing while optimizing for throughput and latency.

In this talk, I will introduce algorithms that leverage programmable switches for accelerating database operations and for improving network telemetry. Switches are orders of magnitude more efficient than traditional hardware accelerators, exist in the datapath, and are ideal for computation offloading. For telemetry, we will discuss how switches can probabilistically encode information across multiple packets to provide fine-grained network visibility with minimal overheads.

Bio:
Ran is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University working on network monitoring and algorithms. He is partially sponsored by the Zuckerman and the Hiroshi Fujiwara Cyber Security Research Center postdoctoral fellowships. Ran received his B.Sc., M.Sc., and P.hD., from the Computer Science department at Technion.