Programmable Kernel Abstractions Wanted for Fun (and Profit)!

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• Theophilus A. Benson, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University
• Friday 15 November 2024, 14:00-15:00
• FW26.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Richard Mortier.

All traffic at Meta, Cloudflare, and many large companies are inspected, optimized, and balanced by tiny eBPF programs. Today, the eBPF ecosystem caters to the dominant open-source use cases, i.e., debugging (observability), and network functions (e.g., Firewalls, and cloud networking). However, a growing set of use cases within the enterprise and hyperscaler domains remain unaddressed. As a consequence, eBPF programs in these programs are susceptible to significant performance and availability issues, as evidenced by recent outages.

In this talk, I will provide a brief overview of these emerging use cases and the challenges they introduce. Then, I will discuss recent work at Meta to generalize BPF -management heuristics by introducing mechanisms to decouple BPF management primitives from the kernel’s heuristics. Finally, I will describe ongoing efforts to increase flexibility and reactivity by introducing a novel orchestration paradigm.

Bio: Theophilus A. Benson is a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He earned his B.S. from Tufts, Ph.D. from U of Wisconsin-Madison, and post-doctorate from Princeton. Prof. Benson’s research focuses on improving the performance and availability of computer networks. In particular, he works with a broad set of cloud providers to improve their infrastructures. He has recently been developing an initiative to address the digital divide in the Global South. His research was recognized by paper awards, including IMC , EuroSYS, ANRP . Dr. Benson received the SIGCOMM Test of Time Award, NSF CAREER Award, NEC Faculty Award, Google Faculty Award, Facebook Faculty Award (X2), and Faculty Research and Engagement Program (X2). Prof. Benson was recently named to DARPA ’s ISAT (Information Science and Technology) study group.

This talk is part of the Computer Laboratory Systems Research Group Seminar series.

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