The P4 community announces Matthew Lam as a new co-chair for the P4 API Working Group. Matthew is Steffen Smolka’s successor and will lead the working group together with Chris Sommers going forward. Thank you to Steffen for the many years of contribution to P4.
“We’re happy to welcome Matthew as one of the leads for this initiative. His name immediately came to mind when Steffen announced his departure, and we unanimously nominated him for the role.”
– Chris Sommers, P4 API Working Group Co-Chair
New Co-Chair
Matthew Lam has been an active member and contributor to the P4 community since 2024. Matthew has 2.5 years of experience at Google developing and testing P4-based systems for network switches. Leveraging P4 as a specification language, he builds tools that use formal methods to automatically validate the packet forwarding behavior of switches.
Matthew’s contributions to the P4 project include code contributions to P4Runtime and BMv2. He has driven enhancements to the P4Runtime standard, such as proposing fallback ports in replicas for multicast and other changes for dynamic load balancing. Additionally, Matthew has contributed to the community by mentoring Google Summer of Code (GSoC) projects related to BMv2, such as supporting all possible output packets and packet traces. Matthew is also currently driving 4ward, a glass box P4 simulator built using AI and the P4 specification, building on an effort originally led by Steffen.
In his role as Co-Chair of the P4 API Working Group, Matthew aims to continue evolving the P4Runtime standard and associated tools to meet the demands of modern programmable dataplanes.
Matthew Lam
What is the API Working Group?
The API Working Group defines and standardizes Application Programming Interfaces that allow control planes to control and reprogram P4 data planes in real time. If you’d like to join the API Working Group meetings, request an invitation here.
The API Working Group is one of the four P4 working groups. View all
