Seminars

The Networks Group meets regularly throughout the year for informal discussions, presentations, and a reading group.

Unless otherwise indicated, the informal meetings will be held every Wednesday at 4pm until 5pm in room 6.12, and usually last about an hour. We have moved building located here. (check the deptartmental room bookings page or the central college room bookings page if in doubt). Please contact Felipe Huici (f.huici@cs.ucl.ac.uk) if you have any questions or if you would like to book a seminar slot for a speaker.

May 2007

• May 16th
  Speaker: Patrick Crowley
  Title: An ATCA-based Router Platform and the Open Network Lab
  Abstract: The closed, proprietary nature of commercial networking platforms have made it difficult for researchers to demonstrate their innovations and prototypes to industrial partners in a directly compelling way. Large networking testbeds such as PlanetLab have enabled researchers to evaluate and demonstrate their ideas at scale, but only on personal computer-based platforms which lack the performance levels and technology components expected of commercial networking products. To help bridge this gap, we have developed an open, high-performance networking platform which consists of standard Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture (ATCA) components. Since the platform makes use of the technology components typically found in commercial devices, such as 1/10 Gigabit links, network processors, general-purpose processors, and diverse memory systems such as fast DRAMs, SRAMs, and large ternary content-addressable memories (TCAMs), researchers are able to demonstrate their research contributions in a way that allows industrial partners to see how the same ideas might work on their own proprietary platforms.

  However, the cost and management burdens of such systems represent a major challenge to most academic research groups. To enable the broadest possible usage, we are making these platforms available through Washington University's Open Network Laboratory (ONL), an Internet-accessible networking research laboratory.

  In this talk, we will briefly describe the design of our open networking platform and discuss how it enables innovative networking research through the Open Network Lab.