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CSE Colloquium: Wei Zhang
March 10, 2020 @ 9:30 am - 10:30 am UTC-5
Speaker: Wei Zhang, R&D engineer at Microsoft
Date: Tuesday, March 10
Time: 9:30-10:30am
Location: ITEB 125
Title: Towards an Efficient, Scalable, Dynamic and Flexible NFV-based Data Plane
Abstract: Network function virtualization (NFV) allows traditional hardware middleboxes such as routers and firewalls to run as software on commodity servers, which enables complex, flexible and customized network services. Unfortunately software is typically slower than hardware. In addition, different network flows may need to be steered into different sequences of network functions (called service chains) with customized needs. Furthermore, as network functions become more complex, we need to bring together advances in OS and networking to build efficient and scalable network functions.
In this talk, I will describe an efficient and flexible data plane platform – openNetVM with zero extra packet copy, which can process packets at line rate. Next, I will show a management controller in data plane, Flurries which can provide flow-level performance management and customized service chain. Then, I will describe a software-based load balancer as an example to show how to build efficient and scalable network functions on top of NFV platform. Finally, I will conclude the talk with a brief discussion of my future research plan.
Bio: Wei Zhang is currently a R&D engineer at Microsoft. In August 2018, she finished her Ph.D degree in the Department of Computer Science at the George Washington University. Her projects cover various aspects of computer network and system issues aiming at building efficient, scalable, and flexible network platforms for software-based network functions and developing efficient resource management and scheduling solutions for cloud systems. Her research areas are cloud computing, operating system, distributed system, network system, software & hardware co-design, and resource disaggregation. Her research has appeared in a number of premier conferences and workshops in networking and cloud systems, including CoNext, SIGCOMM, Middleware, SOSR and HotCloud. She received a Best Paper Award from ICAC 2016, Cisco scholarship 2016, second prize in Geni networking competition 2015, Beihang outstanding graduate student and national scholarship in 2014. She has taken research internships in HP labs, AT&T labs research, Futurewei, VMware, Baidu, and Oracle in system, networking and cloud groups.
