Open-NFP Announces Dataplane Acceleration Developer Day Europe 2017

Open-NFP, a worldwide, community-driven organization focused on research and development in datapath offloads and acceleration for SDN and NFV applications, announced today that it will host the upcoming Dataplane Acceleration Developer Day (DXDD) Europe on June 7 in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Open-NFP is experiencing significant demand for furthering dataplane acceleration education and hand-on training for the commercial and research community within Europe to foster next-generation, high-performance SDN and NFV solutions and applications. The DXDD Europe will bring together researchers, developers, students and industry affiliates for hands-on training that satisfies a critical modern data center need: the ability to change the network behavior of COTS server networking hardware at the speed at which one can change software.

Since its inception and the first annual developer conference in 2015, Open-NFP membership has grown and now hosts over 35 open research and development projects from academia and industry. Relevant software and sample datapath libraries are all hosted on GitHub, enabling collaborative development across distributed teams. Many organizations and universities have contributed from within Europe including Airbus, Cambridge University, Fraunhofer FOKUS Institute, Universita della Svizzera italiana, Technische Universitaet Darmstadt, SURFnet, and the University of Wuerzburg.

Designers and operators of modern data center networks want the ability to evolve the features they require in their networks to meet the needs of new cloud workloads and changing traffic patterns. The DXDD will feature extensive hands-on training that will enable participants to rapidly develop or add new networking features into production and ready-to-deploy COTS server networking hardware. The following industry-leading topics spanning multiple programming methods will be the focus of the training: SmartNIC dataplane programming using the P4 programming language; implementation of network functions such as time stamping, probing, and micro VNF using C; as well as implementation of seamless and hardware-agnostic dataplane acceleration using Open vSwitch (OVS) and Enhanced Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) technologies.

“Many of the Open-NFP research and development projects are coming from within the European university and research community, and we are excited to expand our highly educational dataplane acceleration workshops into the region,” said Dr. Bapi Vinnakota, managing director of Open-NFP. “Developers wishing to discuss today’s dataplane acceleration challenges and further their own practical knowledge will appreciate the opportunity for detailed technical discussions and interaction with their peers. We look forward to continuing our collaboration with the academic, industry and research communities to further enhance their programming education and productivity.”

“P4 is a vendor neutral domain specific language that offers many exciting new possibilities,” said Ronald van der Pol of SURFnet’s network department. “We investigate P4 applications that give more insight into what is happening inside the network, and also P4’s potential to facilitate the introduction of new protocols. We look forward to collaborating with Open-NFP to further dataplane acceleration programming education within the European research community.”

“I head a young research group addressing topics related to data analytics, network and systems security working in tight collaboration with several industrial partners. Open-NFP is important for us because we have access to technologies, which are otherwise closed and accessible only through NDAs,” said Dr. Radu State, senior research scientist and head of SEDAN research group at the SnT research center of the University of Luxembourg. “Therefore, the Open-NFP constitutes a valuable asset to my team to get a deep technical understanding of cutting edge research and technologies in the field of computer networking. Furthermore, the platform allows us to develop new approaches for security monitoring, test and prototype them in realistic conditions. I am glad that Open-NFP is making an effort to bring closer and even more reachable all this content and expertise to us. I hope there will be many more chances like this for researchers and universities to come together and strengthen their knowledge.”

Register today to ensure your seat at the conference. Members of the NREN community receive a 50 percent registration discount. The conference will be held at the SURFnet office at Hoog Overborch (Hoog Catharijne) in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

Supporting Resources

• Learn more about DXDD Europe 2017
• Register for DXDD Europe 2017
• Become a member of Open-NFP
• Follow us on Twitter and Facebook

About Open-NFP

Open-NFP.org is a worldwide, community-driven organization that enables open and collaborative research in the area of network function processing in server networking hardware. The organization is designed to serve the growing need from the academic and data center networking communities to conduct cutting-edge research and development in the areas of server-based networking datapath offload and acceleration techniques. The organization’s website is designed to be a common repository of open source networking datapath P4/C application code and research papers. For more information please visit www.open-nfp.org.

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Contact information

Open-NFP:
Brian Sparks, +1 408-802-2775
info@open-nfp.org