Scott Diehl will present a Computer Science Colloquium lecture on Friday, October 28, 2022, from 3-4 p.m. in Rekhi Hall, Room 214. Diehl is a senior staff engineering manager in Google’s Cloud Netinfra organization, leading a team working on high-performance virtualized networking using offloaded hardware. The lecture is presented by the Michigan Tech Department of Computer Science.
Diehl will also conduct a student workshop, “Technical Interviews: An informal workshop for CS and SE majors,” following the lecture from 4:30-5:30 p.m. Learn more here.
Talk Title: Snap: a Microkernel Approach to Host Networking
Talk Abstract: Diehl’s talk presents the design and experience with a microkernel-inspired approach to host networking called Snap. Snap is a userspace networking system that supports Google’s rapidly evolving needs with flexible modules that implement a range of network functions, including edge packet switching, virtualization for our cloud platform, traffic shaping policy enforcement, and a high-performance reliable messaging and RDMA-like service. Snap has been running in production for over three years, supporting the extensible communication needs of several large and critical systems.
Snap enables fast development and deployment of new networking features, leveraging the benefits of address space isolation and the productivity of userspace software development together with support for transparently upgrading networking services without migrating applications off of a machine. At the same time, Snap achieves compelling performance through a modular architecture that promotes principled synchronization with minimal state sharing, and supports real-time scheduling with dynamic scaling of CPU resources through a novel kernel/userspace CPU scheduler co-design. Our evaluation demonstrates over 3x Gbps/core improvement compared to a kernel networking stack for RPC workloads, software-based RDMA-like performance of up to 5M IOPS/core, and transparent upgrades that are largely imperceptible to user applications. Snap is deployed to over half of our fleet of machines and supports the needs of numerous teams.
Speaker Bio: Diehl grew up in Houghton and attended Michigan Tech for the first two years of his computer science education. He graduated with a B.S./M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan, and completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with a thesis in the area of theoretical computer science. Diehl joined Google Madison in 2010, where he has developed the new high-performance distributed storage systems that underpin Google’s data analytics systems, improved development velocity for some of Google’s largest systems such as BigTable and Google Cloud Storage, and seeded and grown new organizations at the site. He is now a Senior Staff Engineering Manager in Google’s Cloud Netinfra organization, leading a team working on high-performance virtualized networking using offloaded hardware. He is also a co-founder of CMX Games, which published the board game “Copper Country.”