ACM SIGCOMM 2022 HACKATHON: P4 on Raspberry PI for Networking Education

Hackathon Program (subject to changes)

Friday August 26, 2022 1:30 pm - 6:00 pm CEST (Room: Graanbeurszaal)
1:30 pm - 6:00 pm Session I
Session I

1:30 pm - 1:45 pm

Introduction

1:45 pm - 2:00 pm

Projects brainstorming and forming groups

2:00 pm - 5:00 pm

Hacking!

5:00 pm - 5:45 pm

Project presentations

5:45 pm - 6:00 pm

Closing

Call For Participation

P4Pi is a low cost, open source hardware platform intended for teaching and research purposes. P4Pi enables designing and deploying P4-based network devices using the Raspberry Pi board. By setting a target price tag of less than an academic book (under $100), P4Pi aims to enable a large number of academic institutes to provide hands-on experience in networking education. Furthermore, as P4Pi is based on the popular Raspberry PI platform, it appeals to other communities such as hobbyists and does not depend on a single-source provider.

P4Pi is developed as part of the P4 Education Workgroup activities. The team aims to provide both educators and practitioners the knowledge and tools required to use P4Pi in class and at home, including tutorials, sample code, tools and community support.

This hackathon aims to bring together members of the networking community for the following goals:

Introduce P4PI to networking researchers and educators, enable them to get started with the platform and practice its use in lab-like environment.

Develop more teaching and supporting materials for the P4PI ecosystem.

Enable researchers from all levels of expertise to develop P4PI-based concepts and early-stage projects, and to stimulate collaborations between new users.

The hackathon will build upon the physical nature of the event to allow both P4 experts and newcomers to take part in the hands-on experience. Tutorial materials will be available online, and participants will be working in teams to achieve different goals.

Go to P4Pi wiki page>

Outline

During the hackathon, participants will join one of the following types of hackathon groups:

Educators - participants who aim to use P4Pi in their classroom and that will use the hackathon to practice<\li> using the platform and develop additional contents.

Contributors - participants with previous knowledge in P4 who want to migrate their code to P4Pi or to develop<\li> better tools, more applications or other target specific projects.

Hackers - participants with expert knowledge in P4 who wish to use the platform for research and development purposes, explore new use cases and come up with cool ideas.

Participants can form groups that are not specific to one of the classifications above.

Audience Expectations and Prerequisites

This hackathon is suitable for both P4 newcomers and existing practitioners. We expect the audiences to have basic knowledge in computer networking, programming skills, and UNIX-based operating system. For the hands-on project, a Raspberry Pi 4 model B is highly recommended. However, it is not mandatory to have a Raspberry Pi in order to take part in the hackathon. The audience can also use their own laptop as part of the hackathon. They can also either use a Raspberry PI, or an image that will be provided by the team to run on their laptop. A virtual machine image with all the necessary development tools and a pre-configured P4Pi image (Raspbian OS with T4P4S and Bmv2) will be provided to the participants. These will allow an easy use of the Raspberry Pi Image and easy P4Pi installation. Previous knowledge of P4 is recommended but not mandatory. A P4 tutorial will be provided as part of the online materials, as well a P4Pi tutorial.

Organizers

Salvatore Signorello

University of Lisbon

Bio:

Salvatore Signorello is an Invited Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon (PT) and a research member of the Resilient Distributed and Networked Systems of the LASIGE research centre. He has been using P4 for teaching and research since 2015. He holds a PhD Degree in Computer Science from the University of Lorraine (FR) and the University of Luxembourg (LU).

Damu Ding

University of Oxford

Bio:

Damu Ding is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oxford. Before joining Oxford, he received his co- tutored PhD Degree from the University of Bologna, Italy, and Fondazione Bruno Kessler Research Center, Italy. Ding has been researching P4-enabled programmable switches for more than 5 years and was the publicity chair of EuroP4 2021.

Fernando Ramos

University of Lisbon

Bio:

Fernando Ramos is an Associate Professor at the Instituto Superior T ́ecnico, University of Lisbon, and a Senior Researcher at INESC-ID, where he heads the Distributed, Parallel, and Secure Systems (DPSS) research area. Fernando co-chairs the P4 Education Working Group. Prior to joining IST, he held positions at the Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon; University of Cambridge; Telefonica Research; Altice Labs; among others. He holds a PhD degree from the University of Cambridge.

Sándor Laki

Eötvös Loránd University

Bio:

Sándor Laki is an Assistant Professor at Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest, Hungary) where he leads the Communication Networks Laboratory. He and his team are key contributors in the development of T4P4S, an open-source P4-compiler and software switch framework with the support of multiple backends (e.g., DPDK, ODP). He holds a PhD Degree in Computer Science from Eötvös Loránd University.

Robert Soulé

Yale University

Bio:

Robert Soulé is an Assistant Professor at Yale University and a Research Scientist at Barefoot Networks, an Intel Company. Soulé previously co-chaired the P4 Education workgroup and is a member of the P4 Technical Steering Team. Prior to joining Yale, he was an Associate Professor at the Università della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano, Switzerland, where he still holds an Adjunct Professor position. He holds a PhD Degree in Computer Science from New York University and did postdoctoral work at Cornell University.

Noa Zilberman

University of Oxford

Bio:

Noa Zilberman is an Associate Professor at the University of Oxford. Prior to joining Oxford, she was a Fellow and an Affiliated Lecturer at the University of Cambridge. Zilberman co-chairs the P4 Education workgroup, is a member of the P4 Technical Steering Team, and was the Chief Architect of NetFPGA SUME and NetFPGA Plus. She holds a PhD Degree in Electrical Engineering from Tel Aviv University.