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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)



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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