ACM SIGCOMM 2019 Workshop on Networking and Programming Languages (NetPL 2019)

Workshop Program

Click here to access the proceedings

Friday, August 23, 2019, Shangri-La Hotel
09:00am - 10:00am Opening remarks
Opening remarks

Keynote 1: Network Verification in Azure

Speaker: Karthick Jayaraman (Microsoft)

10:00am - 10:30am Coffee break
Coffee break
10:30am - 12:00pm Short papers
Short papers

Optimizing Data Plane Programs for the Network

J. Krude, M. Eichholz, M. Winck, K. Wehrle, M. Mezini (RWTH Aachen / TU Damstadt)

Real Time Control Plane Verification

Y. Li, J. Jia, X. Hu, J. Li (Tsinghua University)

NV: An intermediate language for network verification

R. Beckett, N. Giannarakis, D. Loehr, D. Walker (Microsoft Research / Princeton)

Dataplane verification for P4

D. Dumitrescu (University Politehnica of Bucharest)

Magellan: Toward High-Level Programming and Analysis of SDN using Flow Algebra

Y. Richard Yang, Kai Gao, Kerim Gokarslan, and Dong Guo, Christopher Leet (Yale)

11:30am - 13:30pm Lunch Break
Lunch Break

13:30pm - 14:30pm Keynote 2: Building Efficient Packet Processing Flows with NPL

Speaker: Venkat Pullela (Broadcom)

14:30pm - 15:00pm Keynote 3: Finding Needle in a Haystack - Provenance support for network diagnostics

Speaker: Wenchao Zhou (Georgetown University)

15:00pm - 15:30pm Coffee break
Coffee break

15:30pm - 16:00pm Keynote 4: Localizing Router Configuration Errors Using Unsatisfiable Cores

Speaker: Aaron Gember Jacobson (Colgate University)

16:00pm - 17:00pm Network Programmability: Boom or Bust?

Kun Tan (Huawei), Hongjang Liu (Alibaba), Venkat Pullela (Broadcom)
Network Programmability: Boom or Bust?

Call for Papers

The NetPL workshop provides a forum to bring together researchers and practitioners from the fields of programming languages, formal methods, software verification and networking.

Motivaiton: Recent technological trends, such as Programmable Network Hardware, Software-Defined Networking, Network Functions Virtualization, have created an opportunity to design, implement and deploy exciting new applications with relative ease. Networking can be improved by designing suitable languages for expressing operator’s needs, but such languages are rarely designed by language specialists. The result is a practitioner-driven development of languages that does not draw on the wealth of experience available in the PL community. Moreover, programs to be deployed in the network have been shown to have different types of bugs (e.g. recent P4 verification work); in deployment such bugs could cause damage to networks and prompt a new ossification wave that programmable networks are trying to undo.

NetPL 2019 will address this mismatch by bridging between the areas of PL, formal verification and networking, thus enabling language specialists to apply the wealth of theoretical and practical knowledge on designing and implementing languages and compilers that has been developed over the years. It would allow networking specialists to build systems that are provably robust and that can rely on the tooling and reasoning frameworks for such languages that in turn can improve the degree to which reasoning can be automated. This can make possible higher-level control of aspects of computer networks, the low-level details of which are managed automatically.

This is the fifth NetPL workshop; in prior years NetPL was collocated with Ecoop, Sigcomm and POPL. Talks from the previous editions of the workshop are on YouTube.

Topics of Interest

Language-centric research of the following aspects of computer networks is in scope:

Specification and topology
Automated verification, testing and measurement
Packet/traffic generation
Packet/traffic analysis
Security
Resource availability or control
Policy languages
Interoperability between networking-related languages
Composition of networking-related languages

Practical aspects of languages, particularly if oriented towards solving networking problems, are also in scope:

How to model and prototype languages rapidly
What semantic structures are best suited to the networking domain

Format

The workshop will consist of invited and contributed talks, mini-tutorials, and a panel discussion to encourage interaction among attendees. The workshop is intended to stimulate dialog between communities, and not interfere with the publication of the ideas discussed – there are larger venues for this, and with more archival record, for such dissemination. To this end, presenters may talk about previously published results, current developments, or speculate on future needs.

Participation in the workshop is open to everyone. To give a talk, please submit a one page description of the proposed talk; these will be lightly reviewed by the workshop co-chairs.

Paper Submission:

Please submit your paper via https://sigcomm19netpl.hotcrp.com/.

Authors Take Note

The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to TWO WEEKS prior to the first day of the conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

Registration

Attendance of the workshop is by open registration and subject to the same registration fees and rules as all the other SIGCOMM 2019 workshops. The registrants of the workshop may freely attend any workshop on the same day.