By Bapi Vinnakota
It’s been one year since we formed Open-NFP during our first developer conference in November 2015 with the goal to further research and education in dataplane acceleration and flow processing. We are excited to see the rapid growth in the community’s efforts and rallying around this cause. As you can see with the image below, Open-NFP and its website continues to grow with educational content and now offers four platforms to support research, a new SDK and a community for researchers from around the world to easily collaborate together.
To cap the year off, Open-NFP just held its second annual developer day, Dataplane Acceleration Developer Day (DXDD) 2016, at the Computer History Museum on November 10, 2016. The conference was a hands-on introduction to dataplane acceleration in multiple technologies. The conference welcomed attendees from more than thirty five companies, institutions and universities from the USA, UK, Israel and Japan. Researchers on Open-NFP from academia and industry presented overviews of their research in the last session of the conference.
This year’s agenda included a mix of labs and lectures. The day opened with a keynote from Niel Viljoen, Netronome’s CEO. The lectures covered tools and languages to program dataplane acceleration, including P4, C, Open vSwitch (OVS), eBPF and an SDK. The primary component of the agenda was hands-on labs to program in P4 and to use OVS acceleration. For the P4 labs, attendees built a simple telemetry tool to monitor network performance using Netronome’s Agilio P4C SDK and downloaded to and tested their code on Netronome’s Agilio intelligent server adapters (ISAs). In addition, attendees experimented with offloading connection tracking in OVS to the Netronome ISA.
DXDD was the grand finale to a busy week of technical outreach for Open-NFP. Earlier in the week, we delivered tutorials on P4 at the 2016 IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization and at the P4 Developer Day, both in Palo Alto. Slides, videos and code from the week will become readily available on www.open-nfp.org.
We want to thank everyone that participated in our numerous activities throughout the year and we look forward to working closely with the community to bring more content and education to help further your research goals.