The Network as a Programmable Platform – Nick McKeown

Gerald M. Masson Distinguished Lecture Series
October 13, 2020

“The Network as a Programmable Platform”
Nick McKeown, Stanford University

In the past 10 years, large network owners and operators have taken control of the software that controls their networks. They are now starting to take control of how packets are processed, too. Networks, for the first time, are on the cusp of being programmable end-to-end, specified top-to-bottom, and defined entirely by software. We will think of the network as a programmable platform, a distributed system, that we specify top-down using software rather than protocols. This has big ramifications for networks in the future, creating some interesting new possibilities to verify that a network is “correct by construction,” to measure and validate its behavior in real-time against a network specification, and to correct bugs through closed-loop control.

Nick McKeown is the Kleiner Perkins, Mayfield, Sequoia Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University. His research work has focused mostly on how to improve and scale the internet. From 1988 to 2005, he focused mostly on making the internet faster, and since 2005, he has focused on how to evolve networks faster than before. McKeown co-founded several networking startups, including Nicira (software-defined networking and network virtualization) and Barefoot Networks (programmable switches and P4). He co-founded the Open Networking Foundation, the Open Networking Lab, the P4 Language Consortium, and an educational non-profit called CS Bridge dedicated to teaching high school students worldwide, in-person, how to program. McKeown is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. He received the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2012, the NEC C&C Prize in 2015, and an honorary doctorate from the Federal Institute of Technology Zurich in 2014.