Demo: Disaggregated Dataplanes

Abstract

Modern programmable network hardware enables in-network computing-pushing increasingly-complex logic into the network to improve the performance, flexibility and reliability of network services. But the current network programming paradigm is constrained to programming a single network device at a time. The lack of support for in-network programs that use several and heterogeneous network hardware simultaneously constrains the scale and behaviour of in-network programs. Dataplane Disaggregation is a new paradigm that addresses this problem. It distributes computations across programmable network hardware including switches and smart NICs. This paradigm transforms a monolithic in-network program into a distributed system executing on possibly heterogeneous resources. The goal of this demo is to make an accessible presentation of Dataplane Disaggregation to the wider distributed systems community. This is intended to stimulate discussion on effective ways to program distributed and heterogeneous systems. Our demo is based on the Flightplan system prototype. Flightplan is open-source and comes with detailed documentation and support scripts, yet it requires some effort to set up and run. This impedes its study by others. Our demo runs completely in the browser and does not burden viewers with any installation effort at all. The technical contribution of this demo consists of a customised visualisation of Flightplan experiments. Moreover, the demo is well-suited to virtual events—as is being planned for ICDCS'21—since it can be run independently and asynchronously by viewers of the demo. This is especially helpful for viewers with slow or intermittent Internet connections. We make the demo's source code freely available online for use by others, including researchers who want to build similar demos.