KBNets 2018 - 2018 Workshop on Kernel Bypassing Networks (KBNets 2018)

Kernel Bypassing Networks (including, but not limited to RDMA, DPDK and SmartNIC) have recently drawn much attention from both the research community and the industry. Emerging applications such as AI training, distributed storage systems, virtual networking, and software middle­boxes/NFV demand low latency, high bandwidth and low CPU overhead from the network, and have been shown to benefit significantly from technologies that bypass the conventional OS network stack. At the same time, recent switch and NIC developments (e.g., RoCE) have paved the way to the large­scale deployment of KBNets.
KBNets are thus starting to be deployed in practice. But plenty of research remains to be done. For example, the research community is still debating whether the kernel should be bypassed in different use­cases, what sort of control plane and network management systems are needed for such networks, and how to design congestion control protocols for KBNets and deal with inherent problems such as deadlocks, and how to design programming languages for KBNets. Perhaps more importantly, there is much more work needed to understand how KBNets will impact the design of distributed systems and applications that run over these networks.
We believe that networking community must expedite the research on the design of kernel bypassing networks, understand both their strengths and their weaknesses, and rethink how we design distributed systems to take advantage of these networks.
The ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Kernel Bypassing Networks (KBNets 2018) is organized with the goal of bringing together researchers from the networking, operating systems, and distributed systems communities to promote the development and evolution of kernel bypassing networks. All submissions related to KBNets and KBNets­based systems, including network/system architecture, design, implementation, programing language, simulation, modeling, analysis, and measurement will be welcome. We highly encourage novel and innovative early stage work that will encourage discussion and future research on KBNets.
Topics of Interest
Topics include but are not limited to:
Network transport for kernel bypassing networks
Control plane for kernel bypassing networks
Security issues regarding kernel bypassing networks
Distributed systems that are based on kernel bypassing networks, e.g., AI training, distributed storage, database and in­memory caches
Data center network architectures for kernel bypassing networks
Virtualization for kernel bypassing networks
Programming languages for kernel bypassing networks
NIC/switch hardware design for kernel bypassing networks
Middle­boxes/NFV optimization with kernel bypassing networks
Diagnosing and troubleshooting kernel bypassing networks
Experiences and best­practices in deploying kernel bypassing networks
Measurements of kernel bypassing and kernel optimizing networks
Performance studies of kernel bypassing networks and applications
Transition and backward compatibility with traditional network stacks
Other approaches such as high performance OS data­plane architectures