episode-39.xml

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  <title>BigBug: Practical Concurrency Analysis for SDN</title>
  <guests>Ahmed El-Hassany from ETH Zürich</guests>
  <description>
    <p>
      Ahmed El-Hassany is a second-year Ph.D. student at ETH Zürich, who
      researches ways to make networks more programmable and to verify the
      correctness of programmable networks.  I caught up with Ahmed at <a
      href="http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sosr/2017/program.html">SOSR</a>,
      the Symposium on SDN Research, where he presented <a
      href="https://sdnracer.ethz.ch/files/sosr17.pdf">BigBug: Practical
      Concurrency Analysis for SDN</a>, a paper that he authored along with
      Roman May, Laurent Vanbever, and Martin Vechev.  The paper's abstract is:
    </p>

    <blockquote>
      <p>
        By operating in highly asynchronous environments, SDN controllers often
        suffer from bugs caused by concurrency violations.  Unfortunately,
        state-of-the-art concurrency analyzers for SDNs often report thousands
        of true violations, limiting their effectiveness in practice.
      </p>

      <p>
        This paper presents BigBug, an approach for automatically identifying
        the most representative concurrency violations: those that capture the
        cause of the violation. The two key insights behind BigBug are that:
        (i) many violations share the same root cause, and (ii) violations with
        the same cause share common characteristics.  BigBug leverages these
        observations to cluster reported violations according to the similarity
        of events in them as well as SDN-specific features.  BigBug then
        reports the most representative violation for each cluster using a
        ranking function.
      </p>

      <p>
        We implemented BigBug and showed its practical effectiveness. In more
        than 100 experiments involving different controllers and applications,
        BigBug systematically produced 6 clusters or less, corresponding to a
        median decrease of 95% over state-of-the-art analyzers. The number of
        violations reported by BigBug also closely matched that of actual bugs,
        indicating that BigBug is effective at identifying root causes of SDN
        races.
      </p>
    </blockquote>

    <p>
      For more information on BigBug, visit the <a
      href="https://sdnracer.ethz.ch/">SDNRacer</a> website.  You can find
      contact information for Ahmed on <a
      href="http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~eahmed/">his webpage</a>.
    </p>

    <p class="attribution">
      OVS Orbit is produced by <a href="mailto:blp@ovn.org">Ben Pfaff</a>.  The
      intro music in this episode is <a
      href="http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/AlexBeroza/43098">Drive</a>,
      featuring cdk and DarrylJ, copyright 2013, 2016 by Alex.  The bumper
      music is <a href="http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/42100">Yeah Ant</a>
      featuring Wired Ant and Javolenus, copyright 2013 by Speck.  The outro
      music is <a href="http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/43005">Space
      Bazooka</a> featuring Doxen Zsigmond, copyright 2013 by Kirkoid.  All
      content is licensed under a Creative Commons <a
      href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/">Attribution 3.0
      Unported (CC BY 3.0)</a> license.
    </p>
  </description>
  <pubDate>Tue, 01 Aug 2017 03:35:23 GMT</pubDate>
</item>