EECS Seminar

Host: JongWon Kim / Language: English

Monday, June 27, 2016, 16:00,

#203, EECS-B Bldg. 2nd Floor

 Simplifying Datacenter Network

 Debugging with PathDump

 Dr. Myungjin Lee

University of Edinburgh, England

Abstract:

 Datacenter network debugging is complex. Existing network debuggers are even more complex, requiring in-network techniques like dynamic switch rule updates, collecting per-packet per-switch logs, collecting data plane snapshots, packet mirroring, packet sampling, traffic replay, etc.

This work calls for a radically different approach: in contrast to existing tools that implement the functionality entirely in-network (i.e., on network switches), we should carefully partition the debugging tasks between the edge and the network. To that end, I present PathDump, a minimalistic network debugger that achieves two main goals: (1) implement a large fraction of published network debugging functionalities using the network edge only; and (2) for functionalities that cannot entirely be implemented at the edge, use debugging at the edge to reduce the problem to a small subset of the network.

In this talk, I will discuss the design, implementation and evaluation of PathDump, that currently runs over a real mid-scale network comprising only of commodity network components. Our evaluation shows that PathDump requires minimal switch and edge resources, while enabling network debugging over fine-grained time scales.

Bio:
Dr. Lee is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. His main research area is computer networks. Particular topics of interest include datacenter networks, software-defined networking and scalable network functions. He holds a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University. He obtained a Master"s degree in Computer Science from KAIST and a B.E. degree in Electronic and Electrical Engineering from Kyungpook National University, both based in South Korea. He has six years of experience in the industry.