Andromeda: performance, isolation, and velocity at scale in cloud network virtualization

May 2, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

Andromeda: performance, isolation, and velocity at scale in cloud network virtualization Dalton et al., NSDI'18 Yesterday we took a look at the Microsoft Azure networking stack, today it’s the turn of the Google Cloud Platform. (It’s a very handy coincidence to have two such experience and system design report papers appearing side by side so ... Continue Reading

Azure accelerated networking: SmartNICs in the public cloud

May 1, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 5 Comments

Azure accelerated networking: SmartNICs in the public cloud Firestone et al., NSDI'18 We’re still on the ‘beyond CPUs’ theme today, with a great paper from Microsoft detailing their use of FPGAs to accelerate networking in Azure. Microsoft have been doing this since 2015, and hence this paper also serves as a wonderful experience report documenting ... Continue Reading

NetChain: Scale-free sub-RTT coordination

April 30, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 8 Comments

NetChain: Scale-free sub-RTT coordination Jin et al., NSDI'18 NetChain won a best paper award at NSDI 2018 earlier this month. By thinking outside of the box (in this case, the box is the chassis containing the server), Jin et al. have demonstrated how to build a coordination service (think Apache ZooKeeper) with incredibly low latency ... Continue Reading

KV-Direct: High-performance in-memory key-value store with programmable NIC

November 23, 2017 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 14 Comments

KV-Direct: High-performance in-memory key-value store with programmable NIC Li et al., SOSP’17 We’ve seen some pretty impressive in-memory datastores in past editions of The Morning Paper, including FaRM, RAMCloud, and DrTM. But nothing that compares with KV-Direct: With 10 programmable NIC cards in a commodity server, we achieve 1.22 billion KV operations per second, which ... Continue Reading

Learning networking by reproducing research results

October 27, 2017 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

Learning networking by reproducing research results Yan & McKeown et al., SIGCOMM’17 Students taking Stanford’s Advanced Topics in Networking class have to select a networking research paper and reproduce a result from it as part of a three-week pair project. At the end of the process, they publish their findings on the course’s public Reproducing ... Continue Reading

The QUIC transport protocol: design and Internet-scale deployment

October 26, 2017 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

The QUIC transport protocol: design and Internet-scale deployment Langley et al., SIGCOMM’17 QUIC is a transport protocol designed from the ground up by Google improve the performance of HTTPS traffic. The chances are you’ve already used it - QUIC is deployed in Chrome, in the YouTube mobile app, and in the Google Search app on ... Continue Reading

A longitudinal, end-to-end view of the DNSSEC ecosystem

September 20, 2017 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 5 Comments

A longitudinal, end-to-end view of the DNSSEC ecosystem Chung et al., USENIX Security 2017 DNS, the Domain Name System, provides a vital function on the Internet, mapping names to values. Unprotected, it's also an attractive target for hackers with attack vectors such DNS spoofing and cache poisoning. Thus about two decades ago a set of ... Continue Reading

RFP: When RPC is faster than server-bypass with RDMA

June 7, 2017 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

RFP: When RPC is faster than server-bypass with RDMA Su et al., EuroSys'17 Every system that works with RDMA faces a choice of how best to use it: IP emulation mode, two-sided request-reply calls (RPC), one-sided calls, or even dropping down to the datagram level. We've seen a number of papers weighing in on this ... Continue Reading

FM Backscatter: Enabling connected cities and smart fabrics

April 28, 2017November 11, 2019 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

FM Backscatter: Enabling connected cities and smart fabrics Wang et al., NSDI'17 If we want to connect all the things, then we need a means of sending and/or receiving information at each thing. These transmissions require power, and no-one wants to have to plug in chargers or keep swapping batteries for endless everyday objects. So ... Continue Reading

BBR: Congestion-based congestion control

March 31, 2017November 11, 2019 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 8 Comments

BBR: Congestion-based congestion control Cardwell et al., ACM Queue Sep-Oct 2016 With thanks to Hossein Ghodse (@hossg) for recommending today's paper selection. This is the story of how members of Google's make-tcp-fast project developed and deployed a new congestion control algorithm for TCP called BBR (for Bandwidth Bottleneck and Round-trip propagation time), leading to 2-25x ... Continue Reading

the morning paper

a random walk through Computer Science research, by Adrian Colyer
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Networking