Congratulations to this year’s winners of the Novel Applications of P4 Awards, Fabricio Rodriguez, Pratap Pellakuru and Sharmila S.! The awards are offered to encourage creative and disruptive use cases for P4 and all the presentations included in the P4 2022 Workshop were eligible to win. Award winners were selected based on a combination of community vote and program committee selection. A $500 award will be provided for each of the winning presentations.
Most Novel Application in a Networking Use Case Winner
Fabricio Rodriguez
PhD Student, UNICAMP
“P7 (P4 Programmable Patch Panel): An Instant 100G Emulated Network Testbed in a Pizza Box”
In the demonstration, Fabricio discusses options to validate a network topology, including the link metrics, which are traditionally based on virtual environments which limit experimentation with transmission speeds over 10Gbps. With the programmability that P4 brings to the network and the capabilities of new generation hardware supporting the PSA (Portable Switch Architecture) and TNA (Tofino Native Architecture) P4 architectures, he defines emulation characteristics of the links and demonstrates a network topology with high fidelity and computation power using a single physical P4 switch. View the video.
Most Novel Non-Networking Use of P4 Winners
Pratap Pellakuru. Development Tools Software Architect, Intel
Sharmila S., Cloud Software Development Engineer, Intel
“P4 Designer Demo”
In this discussion and demo Pratap and Sharmila introduce P4 Designer, a GUI tool to generate P4 files from a graphical representation of the network.
P4 Designer is intended to help design and build P4 programs for a target architecture using interactive graphical elements. It has multiple uses: for example, it can help define P4 objects relation to the target, pre-validate the P4 program before handing it over to the compiler, auto generate P4 code for the target pipeline, take care of backward compatibility when some of the hardware hints are updated or eliminated by vendor, and provide a visual representation of a P4 program and its layout that’s easy to understand. They conclude with a demonstration of a proof of concept implementation of P4 Designer. View the video.
Most Novel Non-Networking Use of P4 – Honorable Mention
Kaarthik Alagappan, Graduate Research Assistant, University of Central Florida
“SuperP4: Preprocessor-Aware Syntax and Semantic Analysis for P4 Programs”
In this tech brief Kaarthik presents the concepts behind SuperP4, which is to create a P4 language parser and semantic analyzer that is preprocessor-aware. SuperP4 can be used as a tool to perform analysis with the preprocessor information. While a standard parser produces a single AST that can be analyzed, SuperP4 produces an AST with branches, taking into account all possible configurations. With a preprocessor-aware AST, one can collect the type information and data flow information corresponding to the preprocessor configuration it is present under. Such information enables cross-configuration analysis such as: checking if a value is mutated under multiple configurations; checking if a type error occurs within or between configurations; and identifying incompatible configurations. View the video.
P4 2022 Workshop Now On-Demand
The P4 2022 Workshop took place May 24-26th, 2022 and included 8 live keynote sessions and 40+ on-demand talks which are all accessible now on-demand. Sign up for the ONF newsletter for updates about all of our open source projects and events check out our website.