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Paper Digest: NSDI 2018 Highlights

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USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI) is one of the top conferences on networked systems. In 2018, it is to be held in Renton, Washington State. Among 255 submissions, 40 of which were accepted.

To help the community quickly catch up on the work presented in this conference, Paper Digest Team processed all accepted papers, and generated one highlight sentence (typically the main topic) for each paper. Readers are encouraged to read these machine generated highlights / summaries to quickly get the main idea of each paper.

We thank all authors for writing these interesting papers, and readers for reading our digests. If you do not want to miss any interesting academic paper, you are welcome to sign up our free daily paper digest service to get new paper updates customized to your own interests on a daily basis. You are also welcome to follow us on Twitter and Linkedin for conference digest updates.

Paper Digest Team
team@paperdigest.org

TABLE 1: NSDI 2018 Papers

Title Authors Highlight
1 Approximating Fair Queueing on Reconfigurable Switches Naveen Kr. Sharma and Ming Liu, Kishore Atreya, Arvind Krishnamurthy, In this paper, we use emerging reconfigurable switches to develop an approximate form of Fair Queueing that operates at line-rate.
2 PASTE: A Network Programming Interface for Non-Volatile Main Memory Michio Honda, Giuseppe Lettieri, Lars Eggert and Douglas Santry, We propose PASTE, a new network programming interface for NVMM.
3 NetChain: Scale-Free Sub-RTT Coordination Xin Jin, Xiaozhou Li, Haoyu Zhang, Nate Foster, Jeongkeun Lee, Robert Soul?, Changhoon Kim, Ion Stoica, This paper presents NetChain, a new approach that provides scale-free sub-RTT coordination in datacenters.
4 Azure Accelerated Networking: SmartNICs in the Public Cloud Daniel Firestone, Andrew Putnam, Sambhrama Mundkur, Derek Chiou, Alireza Dabagh, Mike Andrewartha, Hari Angepat, Vivek Bhanu, Adrian Caulfield, Eric Chung, Harish Kumar Chandrappa, Somesh Chaturmohta, Matt Humphrey, Jack Lavier, Norman Lam, Fengfen Liu, Kalin Ovtcharov, Jitu Padhye, Gautham Popuri, Shachar Raindel, Tejas Sapre, Mark Shaw, Gabriel Silva, Madhan Sivakumar, Nisheeth Srivastava, Anshuman Verma, Qasim Zuhair, Deepak Bansal, Doug Burger, Kushagra Vaid, David A. Maltz, and Albert Greenberg, We present Azure Accelerated Networking (AccelNet), our solution for offloading host networking to hardware, using custom Azure SmartNICs based on FPGAs.
5 zkLedger: Privacy-Preserving Auditing for Distributed Ledgers Neha Narula, Willy Vasquez, Madars Virza, This paper presents zkLedger, the first system to protect ledger participants? privacy and provide fast, provably correct auditing.
6 Exploiting a Natural Network Effect for Scalable, Fine-grained Clock Synchronization Yilong Geng, Shiyu Liu, and Zi Yin, Ashish Naik, Balaji Prabhakar and Mendel Rosenblum, Amin Vahdat, In this paper, we present HUYGENS, a software clock synchronization system that uses a synchronization network and leverages three key ideas.
7 SnailTrail: Generalizing Critical Paths for Online Analysis of Distributed Dataflows Moritz Hoffmann, Andrea Lattuada, John Liagouris, Vasiliki Kalavri, Desislava Dimitrova, Sebastian Wicki, Zaheer Chothia, and Timothy Roscoe, We rigorously generalize critical path analysis (CPA) to long-running and streaming computations and present SnailTrail, a system built on Timely Dataflow, which applies our analysis to a range of popular distributed dataflow engines.
8 Balancing on the Edge: Transport Affinity without Network State Jo?o Taveira Ara?jo, Lorenzo Saino, Lennert Buytenhek, and Raul Landa, This paper introduces Faild, a distributed load balancer which runs on commodity hardware and achieves graceful failover without relying on network state, providing a cost-effective and scalable alternative to existing proposals.
9 Stateless Datacenter Load-balancing with Beamer Vladimir Olteanu, Alexandru Agache, Andrei Voinescu, and Costin Raiciu, We present Beamer, a datacenter load-balancer that is designed to ensure stateless mux operation.
10 Larry: Practical Network Reconfigurability in the Data Center Andromachi Chatzieleftheriou, Sergey Legtchenko, Hugh Williams, and Antony Rowstron, Larry is a network design that allows racks to dynamically adapt their bandwidth to the aggregation switches as a function of the traffic demand.
11 Semi-Oblivious Traffic Engineering: The Road Not Taken Praveen Kumar and Yang Yuan, Chris Yu, Nate Foster and Robert Kleinberg, Petr Lapukhov and Chiun Lin Lim, Robert Soul?, This paper presents a system that uses a set of paths computed using R?cke?s oblivious routing algorithm, as well as a centralized controller to dynamically adapt sending rates.
12 Metron: NFV Service Chains at the True Speed of the Underlying Hardware Georgios P. Katsikas, Tom Barbette, Dejan Kostic, Rebecca Steinert, Gerald Q. Maguire Jr., In this paper we present Metron, a Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) platform that achieves high resource utilization by jointly exploiting the underlying network and commodity servers? resources.
13 G-NET: Effective GPU Sharing in NFV Systems Kai Zhang, Bingsheng He, Jiayu Hu, Zeke Wang, Bei Hua, Jiayi Meng, and Lishan Yang, In this paper, we propose G-NET, an NFV system with a GPU virtualization scheme that supports spatial GPU sharing, a service chain based GPU scheduler, and a scheme to guarantee data isolation in the GPU.
14 SafeBricks: Shielding Network Functions in the Cloud Rishabh Poddar, Chang Lan, Raluca Ada Popa, and Sylvia Ratnasamy, We present SafeBricks, a system that shields generic network functions (NFs) from an untrusted cloud.
15 Vesper: Measuring Time-to-Interactivity for Web Pages Ravi Netravali and Vikram Nathan, James Mickens, Hari Balakrishnan, To solve this problem, we introduce Vesper, a tool that rewrites a page?s JavaScript and HTML to automatically discover the page?s interactive state.
16 Towards Battery-Free HD Video Streaming Saman Naderiparizi, Mehrdad Hessar, Vamsi Talla, Shyamnath Gollakota, and Joshua R Smith, To achieve this, we present an ?analog? video backscatter technique that feeds analog pixels from the photo-diodes directly to the backscatter hardware, thereby eliminating power-consuming hardware components, such as ADCs and codecs.
17 Prophecy: Accelerating Mobile Page Loads Using Final-state Write Logs Ravi Netravali, James Mickens, In this paper, we introduce Prophecy, a new acceleration technology for mobile pages.
18 Salsify: Low-Latency Network Video through Tighter Integration between a Video Codec and a Transport Protocol Sadjad Fouladi, John Emmons, and Emre Orbay, Catherine Wu, Riad S. Wahby and Keith Winstein, Salsify is a new architecture for real-time Internet video that tightly integrates a video codec and a network transport protocol, allowing it to respond quickly to changing network conditions and avoid provoking packet drops and queueing delays.
19 ResQ: Enabling SLOs in Network Function Virtualization Amin Tootoonchian, Aurojit Panda, Chang Lan, Melvin Walls, Katerina Argyraki, Sylvia Ratnasamy, Scott Shenker, Building on this, we present ResQ, a resource manager for NFV that enforces performance SLOs for multi-tenant NFV clusters in a resource efficient manner.
20 Elastic Scaling of Stateful Network Functions Shinae Woo, Justine Sherry, Sangjin Han, Sue Moon, Sylvia Ratnasamy, Scott Shenker, We organize state as a distributed shared object (DSO) space and extend the DSO concept with techniques designed to meet the need for elasticity and high-performance in NFV workloads.
21 Iron: Isolating Network-based CPU in Container Environments Junaid Khalid, Eric Rozner, Wesley Felter, Cong Xu, and Karthick Rajamani, We propose a scheme, called Iron, that accounts for the time spent in the networking stack on behalf of a container and ensures this processing cannot adversely impact colocated containers through novel enforcement mechanisms.
22 Copa: Practical Delay-Based Congestion Control for the Internet Venkat Arun and Hari Balakrishnan, This paper introduces Copa, an end-to-end congestion control algorithm that uses three ideas.
23 PCC Vivace: Online-Learning Congestion Control Mo Dong and Tong Meng, Doron Zarchy, Engin Arslan, Yossi Gilad, Brighten Godfrey, Michael Schapira, We leverage ideas from the rich literature on online (convex) optimization in machine learning to design Vivace, a novel rate-control protocol, designed within the recently proposed PCC framework.
24 Multi-Path Transport for RDMA in Datacenters Yuanwei Lu, Guo Chen, Bojie Li, Kun Tan, Yongqiang Xiong, Peng Cheng, and Jiansong Zhang, Enhong Chen, Thomas Moscibroda, Unlike previous multipath approaches, which mainly focus on TCP, this paper presents a multi-path transport for RDMA, i.e. MPRDMA, which efficiently utilizes the rich network paths in datacenters.
25 Andromeda: Performance, Isolation, and Velocity at Scale in Cloud Network Virtualization Michael Dalton, David Schultz, Jacob Adriaens, Ahsan Arefin, Anshuman Gupta, Brian Fahs, Dima Rubinstein, Enrique Cauich Zermeno, Erik Rubow, James Alexander Docauer, Jesse Alpert, Jing Ai, Jon Olson, Kevin DeCabooter, Marc de Kruijf, Nan Hua, Nathan Lewis, Nikhil Kasinadhuni, Riccardo Crepaldi, Srinivas Krishnan, Subbaiah Venkata, Yossi Richter, Uday Naik, and Amin Vahdat, This paper presents our design and experience with Andromeda, Google Cloud Platform?s network virtualization stack.
26 LHD: Improving Cache Hit Rate by Maximizing Hit Density Nathan Beckmann, Haoxian Chen, Asaf Cidon, We introduce least hit density (LHD), a novel eviction policy for key-value caches.
27 Performance Analysis of Cloud Applications Dan Ardelean, Amer Diwan, and Chandra Erdman, This paper describes the challenges in collecting actionable data for Gmail, a service with more than 1 billion active accounts.
28 007: Democratically Finding the Cause of Packet Drops Behnaz Arzani, Selim Ciraci, Luiz Chamon, Yibo Zhu and Hongqiang (Harry) Liu, Jitu Padhye, Boon Thau Loo, Geoff Outhred, We introduce 007, a lightweight, always-on diagnosis application that can find problematic links and also pinpoint problems for each TCP connection.
29 Efficient and Correct Test Scheduling for Ensembles of Network Policies Yifei Yuan, Sanjay Chandrasekaran, Limin Jia, and Vyas Sekar, In this paper, we propose Mikado, a principled scheduling framework for scheduling tests generated by various (blackbox) tools for ensembles of policies.
30 Distributed Network Monitoring and Debugging with SwitchPointer Praveen Tammana, Rachit Agarwal, Myungjin Lee, We present SwitchPointer, a network monitoring and debugging system that integrates the best of the two worlds.
31 Stroboscope: Declarative Network Monitoring on a Budget Olivier Tilmans, Tobias B?hler, Ingmar Poese, Stefano Vissicchio, Laurent Vanbever, We present Stroboscope, a system that enables finegrained monitoring of any traffic flow by instructing routers to mirror millisecond-long traffic slices in a programmatic way.
32 PLOVER: Fast, Multi-core Scalable Virtual Machine Fault-tolerance Cheng Wang, Xusheng Chen, Weiwei Jia, Boxuan Li, Haoran Qiu, Shixiong Zhao, and Heming Cui, We present Virtualized SMR (VSMR), a new approach to tackle this open problem.
33 Odin: Microsoft?s Scalable Fault-Tolerant CDN Measurement System Matt Calder, Manuel Schr?der, Ryan Gao, Ryan Stewart, and Jitendra Padhye, Ratul Mahajan, Ganesh Ananthanarayanan, Ethan Katz-Bassett,
Available Media

Content delivery networks (CDNs) are critical for delivering high performance Internet services. Using worldwide deployments of front-ends, CDNs can direct users to the front-end that provides them with the best latency and availability. The key challenges arise from the heterogeneous connectivity of clients and the dynamic nature of the Internet that influences latency and availability. Without continuous insight on performance between users, front-ends, and external networks, CDNs will not be able to attain their full potential performance.

 We describe Odin, Microsoft’s Internet measurement platform for its first-party and third-party customers.
34 Deepview: Virtual Disk Failure Diagnosis and Pattern Detection for Azure Qiao Zhang, Guo Yu, Chuanxiong Guo, Yingnong Dang, Nick Swanson, Xinsheng Yang, Randolph Yao, and Murali Chintalapati, Arvind Krishnamurthy and Thomas Anderson, In this paper, we designed and implemented a system called Deepview for VHD failure localization.
35 LiveTag: Sensing Human-Object Interaction through Passive Chipless WiFi Tags Chuhan Gao and Yilong Li, Xinyu Zhang, Thus, by wirelessly sensing human interaction with them, one can infer activities at a fine resolution, enabling a new wave of ubiquitous computing applications. In this paper, we propose LiveTag to achieve this vision.
36 Inaudible Voice Commands: The Long-Range Attack and Defense Nirupam Roy, Sheng Shen, Haitham Hassanieh, and Romit Roy Choudhury, Our core ideas emerge from a careful forensics on voice, i.e., finding indelible traces of nonlinearity in recorded voice signals.
37 PowerMan: An Out-of-Band Management Network for Datacenters Using Power Line Communication Li Chen, Jiacheng Xia, Bairen Yi, and Kai Chen, In this paper, we introduce power line communication (PLC) to datacenters as an out-of-band management channel.
38 NetComplete: Practical Network-Wide Configuration Synthesis with Autocompletion Ahmed El-Hassany, Petar Tsankov, Laurent Vanbever, and Martin Vechev, We present NetComplete, a system that assists operators in modifying existing network-wide configurations to comply with new routing policies.
39 Automatically Correcting Networks with NEAt Wenxuan Zhou, Jason Croft, Bingzhe Liu, Elaine Ang, and Matthew Caesar, To address this problem, we present NEAt, a system analogous to a smartphone?s autocorrect feature that enables on-the-fly repair to policy-violating updates.
40 Net2Text: Query-Guided Summarization of Network Forwarding Behaviors R?diger Birkner, Dana Drachsler-Cohen, Laurent Vanbever, and Martin Vechev, We introduce Net2Text, a system which assists network operators in reasoning about network-wide forwarding behaviors.