Optimal Oblivious Reconfigurable Networks

Abstract:

As Moore's Law slows down, packet switch capabilities are falling behind datacenter demands. Recent hardware advances have enabled the new switching technology of nanosecond-scale rapid circuit switches. Combined with novel network designs, these have the potential to fully replace packet switches. This talk presents the Oblivious Reconfigurable Network (ORN) design paradigm which is ideally suited to this new switching technology. I describe how to design ORNs that work at datacenter scale, supporting tens of thousands of network nodes. And, I discuss an implementation, Shale, whose tradeoffs in latency and throughput are Pareto optimal among all ORN designs achieving orders of magnitude better latency and memory requirements than prior ORN designs at such scales.

A paper of this works appears in SIGCOMM 2024: "Shale: A Practical, Scalable Oblivious Reconfigurable Networks"

Bio:

Hakim Weatherspoon is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University, Co-Director of the Cornell Institute for Digital Agriculture (CIDA), Cornell Bowers College of Computer and Information Science Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging, and the Chief Scientist of Exostellar, Inc (http://exostellar.io). His research interests cover various aspects of fault-tolerance, reliability, security, and performance of internet-scale data systems such as cloud and distributed systems.  Weatherspoon received his PhD from University of California, Berkeley. Weatherspoon has received awards for his many contributions, including the University of Washington, Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, Alumni Achievement Award;  Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship; and a Kavli Fellowship from the National Academy of Sciences.  Weatherspoon has also been recognized for his work to promote diversity, earning the University of Washington, College of Engineering, Diamond award and Cornell's Zellman Warhaft Commitment to Diversity Award.