Flightplan: Dataplane Disaggregation and Placement for P4 Programs.
Nik Sultana,
John Sonchack,
Isaac Pedisich,
Hans Giesen,
Zhaoyang Han, Nishanth Shyamkumar, Shivani Burad,
André DeHon, and
Boon Thau Loo
and
Proceedings of the USENIX Symposium on Network Systems Design and
Implementation,
(NSDI, April 12--14, 2021)
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Today's dataplane programming approach maps a whole P4 program to a single
dataplane target, limiting a P4 program's performance and
functionality to what a single target can offer. Disaggregating a
single P4 program into subprograms that execute across different
dataplanes can improve performance, utilization and cost. But
doing this manually is tedious, error-prone and must be repeated as
topologies or hardware resources change.
We propose Flightplan: a target-agnostic, programming toolchain that helps
with splitting a P4 program into a set of cooperating P4 programs
and maps them to run as a distributed system formed of several,
possibly heterogeneous, dataplanes. Flightplan can exploit features
offered by different hardware targets and assists with
configuring, testing, and handing-over between dataplanes executing
the distributed dataplane program.
We evaluate Flightplan on a suite of in-network functions and measure the
effects of P4 program splitting in testbed experiments involving
programmable switches, FPGAs, and x86 servers. We show that
Flightplan can rapidly navigate a complex space of splits and
placements to optimize band- width, energy consumption, device
heterogeneity and latency while preserving the P4 program's
behavior.
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