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Paper Digest: NSDI 2020 Highlights

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USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI) is one of the top conferences on networked systems. In 2020, it is to be held in Santa Clara, California.

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.

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Paper Digest Team
team@paperdigest.org

TABLE 1: NSDI 2020 Papers

Title Authors Highlight
1 Frequency Configuration for Low-Power Wide-Area Networks in a Heartbeat Akshay Gadre, Revathy Narayanan, Anh Luong, Anthony Rowe, Bob Iannucci, and Swarun Kumar, This paper presents Chime, a system enabling LP-WAN base stations to identify an optimal frequency of operation after the client sends one packet at one frequency.
2 Plankton: Scalable network configuration verification through model checking Santhosh Prabhu, Kuan-Yen Chou, Ali Kheradmand, Brighten Godfrey, and Matthew Caesar, In this paper, we show that by combining equivalence partitioning with explicit-state model checking, network configuration verification can be scaled significantly better than the state of the art, while still supporting a rich set of protocol features.
3 Expanding across time to deliver bandwidth efficiency and low latency William M. Mellette, Rajdeep Das, Yibo Guo, Rob McGuinness, Alex C. Snoeren, and George Porter, We present Opera, a dynamic network that delivers latency-sensitive traffic quickly by relying on multi-hop forwarding in the same way as expander-graph-based approaches, but provides near-optimal bandwidth for bulk flows through direct forwarding over time-varying source-to-destination circuits.
4 Config2Spec: Mining Network Specifications from Network Configurations R?diger Birkner, Dana Drachsler-Cohen, Laurent Vanbever and Martin Vechev, We present Config2Spec, a system that automatically synthesizes a formal specification (a set of policies) of a network given its configuration and a failure model (e.g., up to two link failures).
5 XRD: Scalable Messaging System with Cryptographic Privacy Albert Kwon, David Lu, Srinivas Devadas, This paper presents XRD (short for Crossroads), a metadata private messaging system that provides cryptographic privacy, while scaling easily to support more users by adding more servers.
6 Re-architecting Congestion Management in Lossless Ethernet Wenxue Cheng and Kun Qian, Wanchun Jiang, Tong Zhang, Fengyuan Ren, Inspired by these insights and findings obtained in experiment investigations, we revise the congestion management architecture, and propose the Photonic Congestion Notification (PCN) scheme, which consists of two basic components: (i) a novel congestion detection and identification mechanism to recognize which flows are really responsible for congestion; (ii) a receiver-driven rate adjustment method to alleviate congestion in as short as 1 RTT.
7 Measuring Congestion in High-Performance Datacenter Interconnects Saurabh Jha and Archit Patke, Jim Brandt and Ann Gentile, Benjamin Lim, Mike Showerman and Greg Bauer, Larry Kaplan, Zbigniew Kalbarczyk, William Kramer, Ravi Iyer, We present a methodology for detecting, extracting, and characterizing regions of congestion in networks.
8 AccelTCP: Accelerating Network Applications with Stateful TCP Offloading YoungGyoun Moon and SeungEon Lee, Muhammad Asim Jamshed, KyoungSoo Park, This work presents AccelTCP, a hardware-assisted TCP stack architecture that harnesses programmable network interface cards (NICs) as a TCP protocol accelerator.
9 Enabling Programmable Transport Protocols in High-Speed NICs Mina Tahmasbi Arashloo and Alexey Lavrov, Manya Ghobadi, Jennifer Rexford, David Walker, and David Wentzlaff, In this paper, we enable programmable transport protocols in high-speed NICs by designing Tonic, a flexible hardware architecture for transport logic.
10 Contra: A Programmable System for Performance-aware Routing Kuo-Feng Hsu, Ryan Beckett, Ang Chen, Jennifer Rexford, Praveen Tammana, and David Walker, We present Contra, a system for performance-aware routing that can adapt to traffic changes at hardware speeds.
11 Network Error Logging: Client-side measurement of end-to-end web service reliability Sam Burnett and Lily Chen, Douglas A. Creager, Misha Efimov, Ilya Grigorik, and Ben Jones, Harsha V. Madhyastha, Pavlos Papageorge, Brian Rogan, Charles Stahl, and Julia Tuttle, We present NEL (Network Error Logging), a planet-scale, client-side, network reliability measurement system.
12 Gandalf: An Intelligent, End-To-End Analytics Service for Safe Deployment in Large-Scale Cloud Infrastructure Ze Li, Qian Cheng, Ken Hsieh, and Yingnong Dang, Peng Huang, Pankaj Singh and Xinsheng Yang, Qingwei Lin, Youjiang Wu, Sebastien Levy, and Murali Chintalapati, In this paper, we present Gandalf, an end-to-end analytics service for safe deployment in a large-scale system infrastructure.
13 Fine-Grained Replicated State Machines for a Cluster Storage System Ming Liu and Arvind Krishnamurthy, Harsha V. Madhyastha, Rishi Bhardwaj, Karan Gupta, Chinmay Kamat, Huapeng Yuan, Aditya Jaltade, Roger Liao, Pavan Konka, and Anoop Jawahar, We describe the design and implementation of a consistent and fault-tolerant metadata index for a scalable block storage system.
14 Meaningful Availability Tam?s Hauer, Philipp Hoffmann, John Lunney, Dan Ardelean, and Amer Diwan, This paper presents and evaluates, in the context of Google’s G Suite, a novel availability metric: windowed user-uptime.
15 SP-PIFO: Approximating Push-In First-Out Behaviors using Strict-Priority Queues Albert Gran Alcoz, Alexander Dietm?ller, and Laurent Vanbever, In this paper, we introduce SP-PIFO, a programmable packet scheduler which closely approximates the behavior of PIFO queues using strict-priority queues—\emph{at line rate, at scale, and on existing devices}.
16 NetSMC: A Custom Symbolic Model Checker for Stateful Network Verification Yifei Yuan, Soo-Jin Moon, Sahil Uppal, Limin Jia, and Vyas Sekar, In this paper, we identify practical opportunities for relaxations in order to develop an efficient verification tool.
17 TinySDR: Low-Power SDR Platform for Over-the-Air Programmable IoT Testbeds Mehrdad Hessar, Ali Najafi, Vikram Iyer, and Shyamnath Gollakota, We introduce tinySDR, the first software-defined radio platform tailored to the needs of power-constrained IoT endpoints.
18 FileMR: Rethinking RDMA Networking for Scalable Persistent Memory Jian Yang, Joseph Izraelevitz, Steven Swanson, This work introduces two changes to the existing RDMA protocol: the file memory region (FileMR) and range based address translation.
19 FLAIR: Accelerating Reads with Consistency-Aware Network Routing Hatem Takruri, Ibrahim Kettaneh, Ahmed Alquraan, and Samer Al-Kiswany, We present FLAIR, a novel approach for accelerating read operations in leader-based consensus protocols.
20 Scalog: Seamless Reconfiguration and Total Order in a Scalable Shared Log Cong Ding, David Chu, and Evan Zhao, Xiang Li, Lorenzo Alvisi and Robbert van Renesse, The paper describes the design and implementation of Scalog and presents examples of applications running upon it.
21 Diamond-Miner: Comprehensive Discovery of the Internet's Topology Diamonds Kevin Vermeulen, Justin P. Rohrer and Robert Beverly, Olivier Fourmaux and Timur Friedman, This paper introduces D-Miner, a system that marries previous work on high-speed probing with multipath discovery to make Internet-wide topology mapping, inclusive of load-balanced paths, feasible.
22 RFocus: Beamforming Using Thousands of Passive Antennas Venkat Arun and Hari Balakrishnan, To address this problem, we introduce RFocus, which moves beamforming functions from the radio endpoints to the environment.
23 High Throughput Cryptocurrency Routing in Payment Channel Networks Vibhaalakshmi Sivaraman, Shaileshh Bojja Venkatakrishnan, Kathleen Ruan, Parimarjan Negi and Lei Yang, Radhika Mittal, Giulia Fanti, Mohammad Alizadeh, In this paper, we present Spider, a routing solution that “packetizes” transactions and uses a multi-path transport protocol to achieve high-throughput routing in PCNs.
24 CarMap: Fast 3D Feature Map Updates for Automobiles Fawad Ahmad and Hang Qiu, Ray Eells, Fan Bai, Ramesh Govindan, In this paper, we explore a different approach: near-real time crowd-sourced 3D map collection from vehicles with advanced sensors (LiDAR, stereo cameras).
25 Sol: Fast Distributed Computation Over Slow Networks Fan Lai, Jie You, Xiangfeng Zhu, Harsha V. Madhyastha, and Mosharaf Chowdhury, In this paper, we take a first-principles approach toward developing an execution engine that can adapt to diverse network conditions.
26 ABC: A Simple Explicit Congestion Controller for Wireless Networks Prateesh Goyal, Anup Agarwal, Ravi Netravali, Mohammad Alizadeh and Hari Balakrishnan, We propose Accel-Brake Control (ABC), a simple and deployable explicit congestion control protocol for network paths with time-varying wireless links.
27 Learning in situ: a randomized experiment in video streaming Francis Y. Yan and Hudson Ayers, Chenzhi Zhu, Sadjad Fouladi, James Hong, Keyi Zhang, Philip Levis, and Keith Winstein, We then developed an ABR algorithm that robustly outperformed other schemes, by leveraging data from its deployment and limiting the scope of machine learning only to making predictions that can be checked soon after.
28 AmphiLight: Direct Air-Water Communication with Laser Light Charles J. Carver and Zhao Tian, Hongyong Zhang and Kofi M. Odame, Alberto Quattrini Li and Xia Zhou, We propose a bidirectional, direct air-water wireless communication link based on laser light, capable of (1) adapting to water dynamics with ultrasonic sensing and (2) steering within a full 3D hemisphere using only a MEMS mirror and passive optical elements.
29 PrivateEye: Scalable and Privacy-Preserving Compromise Detection in the Cloud Behnaz Arzani, Selim Ciraci, Stefan Saroiu, Alec Wolman, and Jack Stokes, Geoff Outhred and Lechao Diwu, We developed PrivateEye to meet the needs of production DCs, and our data collection agent is deployed across all DCs of a large cloud.
30 Finding Network Misconfigurations by Automatic Template Inference Siva Kesava Reddy Kakarla and Alan Tang, Ryan Beckett, Karthick Jayaraman, Todd Millstein, Yuval Tamir and George Varghese, We describe an approach to infer likely network configuration errors without a specification through a form of automated outlier detection.
31 Tiramisu: Fast Multilayer Network Verification Anubhavnidhi Abhashkumar, Aaron Gember-Jacobson, Aditya Akella, We develop a new, general multilayer graph control plane model that enables using fast, property-customized verification algorithms.
32 Experiences with Modeling Network Topologies at Multiple Levels of Abstraction Jeffrey C. Mogul, Drago Goricanec, Anees Shaikh, Douglas Turk, and Bikash Koley, Xiaoxue Zhao, MALT, a Multi-Abstraction-Layer Topology representation, supports virtually all network management phases: design, deployment, configuration, operation, measurement, and analysis.
33 Batchy: Batch-scheduling Data Flow Graphs with Service-level Objectives Tam?s L?vai, Felici?n N?meth, Barath Raghavan, G?bor R?tv?ri, We present Batchy, a scheduler for run-to-completion packet processing engines, which uses controlled queuing to efficiently reconstruct fragmented batches in accordance with strict service-level objectives (SLOs).
34 Firecracker: Lightweight Virtualization for Serverless Applications Alexandru Agache, Marc Brooker, Andreea Florescu, Alexandra Iordache, Anthony Liguori, Rolf Neugebauer, Phil Piwonka, and Diana-Maria Popa, To meet this need, we developed Firecracker, a new open source Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) specialized for serverless workloads, but generally useful for containers, functions and other compute workloads within a reasonable set of constraints.
35 Millions of Tiny Databases Marc Brooker, Tao Chen, and Fan Ping, This paper describes Physalia in context of Amazon EBS, and some other uses within Amazon Web Services.
36 Is Big Data Performance Reproducible in Modern Cloud Networks? Alexandru Uta and Alexandru Custura, Dmitry Duplyakin, Ivo Jimenez, Jan Rellermeyer, Carlos Maltzahn, Robert Ricci, Alexandru Iosup, Focusing on networks, we assess the impact of variability on cloud-based big-data workloads by gathering traces from mainstream commercial clouds and private research clouds.
37 TCP ? RDMA: CPU-efficient Remote Storage Access with i10 Jaehyun Hwang, Qizhe Cai, Ao Tang, and Rachit Agarwal, This paper presents design, implementation and evaluation of i10, a new remote storage stack implemented entirely in the kernel.
38 NetTLP: A Development Platform for PCIe devices in Software Interacting with Hardware Yohei Kuga and Ryo Nakamura, Takeshi Matsuya, Yuji Sekiya, To offer the practical observability on PCIe and for productively prototyping PCIe devices, we propose NetTLP, a development platform for software PCIe devices that can interact with hardware root complexes.
39 Fawkes: Faster Mobile Page Loads via App-Inspired Static Templating Shaghayegh Mardani, Mayank Singh, Ravi Netravali, Inspired by mobile apps, where static content (e.g., layout templates) is cached and immediately rendered while dynamic content (e.g., news headlines) is fetched, we built Fawkes.
40 Automated Verification of Customizable Middlebox Properties with Gravel Kaiyuan Zhang, Danyang Zhuo, Aditya Akella, Arvind Krishnamurthy and Xi Wang, In this paper, we explore the feasibility of verifying “almost unmodified” software middleboxes.
41 Telekine: Secure Computing with Cloud GPUs Tyler Hunt, Zhipeng Jia, Vance Miller, Ariel Szekely, and Yige Hu, Christopher J. Rossbach, Emmett Witchel, Telekine enables applications to use GPU acceleration in the cloud securely, based on a novel GPU stream abstraction that ensures execution and interaction through untrusted components are independent of any secret data.
42 Food and Liquid Sensing in Practical Environments using RFIDs Unsoo Ha, Junshan Leng, and Alaa Khaddaj, Fadel Adib, We present the design and implementation of RF-EATS, a system that can sense food and liquids in closed containers without opening them or requiring any contact with their contents.
43 VMscatter: A Versatile MIMO Backscatter Xin Liu, Zicheng Chi, Wei Wang, and Yao Yao, Ting Zhu, In this paper, we design and implement a versatile MIMO backscatter (VMscatter) system, which leverages the diversity features of MIMO to dramatically decrease bit error rate (BER) and increase throughput with negligible overhead.
44 Eingerprint: Robust Energy-related Fingerprinting for Passive RFID Tags Xingyu Chen, Jia Liu, Xia Wang, Haisong Liu, Dong Jiang, and Lijun Chen, In this paper, we present a new energy-related fingerprint called Eingerprint to authenticate passive tags with commodity RFID devices.
45 Adapting TCP for Reconfigurable Datacenter Networks Matthew K. Mukerjee, Christopher Canel, Weiyang Wang, Daehyeok Kim, Srinivasan Seshan, Alex C. Snoeren, We identify two methods to address this issue: First, an in-network solution that dynamically resizes top-of-rack switch virtual output queues to prebuffer packets; Second, an endpoint-based solution that increases the congestion window, cwnd, based on explicit circuit state feedback sent via the ECN-echo bit.
46 TimeCrypt: Encrypted Data Stream Processing at Scale with Cryptographic Access Control Lukas Burkhalter, Anwar Hithnawi, Alexander Viand and Hossein Shafagh, Sylvia Ratnasamy, This paper presents TimeCrypt, a system that provides scalable and real-time analytics over large volumes of encrypted time series data.
47 Understanding, Detecting and Localizing Partial Failures in Large System Software Chang Lou, Peng Huang, and Scott Smith, We thus propose OmegaGen, a static analysis tool that automatically generates customized watchdogs for a given program by using a novel program reduction technique.
48 Ghostor: Toward a Secure Data-Sharing System from Decentralized Trust Yuncong Hu, Sam Kumar, and Raluca Ada Popa, We propose Ghostor, a data-sharing system that, using only decentralized trust, (1) hides user identities from the server, and (2) allows users to detect server-side integrity violations.
49 Performant TCP for Low-Power Wireless Networks Sam Kumar, Michael P Andersen, Hyung-Sin Kim, and David E. Culler, We present a systematic study of a well-designed TCP stack in IEEE 802.15.4-based LLNs, based on the TCP protocol logic in FreeBSD.
50 A High-Speed Load-Balancer Design with Guaranteed Per-Connection-Consistency Tom Barbette, Chen Tang, Haoran Yao, Dejan Kostic, Gerald Q. Maguire Jr., Panagiotis Papadimitratos, and Marco Chiesa, This paper presents Cheetah, a load balancer that supports uniform load distribution and PCC while being scalable, memory efficient, resilient to clogging attacks, and fast at processing packets.
51 tpprof: A Network Traffic Pattern Profiler Nofel Yaseen, John Sonchack, and Vincent Liu, In this paper, we introduce tpprof, a profiler for network traffic patterns.
52 LocAP: Autonomous Millimeter Accurate Mapping of WiFi Infrastructure Roshan Ayyalasomayajula, Aditya Arun, Chenfeng Wu, Shrivatsan Rajagopalan, Shreya Ganesaraman, Aravind Seetharaman, Ish Kumar Jain, and Dinesh Bharadia, In this paper, for the first time, we establish the accuracy requirements for the location attributes of access points to achieve decimeter level user localization accuracy.
53 Rex: Preventing Bugs and Misconfiguration in Large Services Using Correlated Change Analysis Sonu Mehta, Ranjita Bhagwan, and Rahul Kumar, Chetan Bansal, Chandra Maddila and B. Ashok, Sumit Asthana, Christian Bird, Aditya Kumar We have designed and deployed Rex, a tool that, using a combination of machine learning and program analysis, learns change-rules that capture such correlations.
54 APKeep: Realtime Verification for Real Networks Peng Zhang and Xu Liu, Hongkun Yang, Ning Kang, Zhengchang Gu, and Hao Li, To scale real- time verification to real networks, we propose APKeep based on a new modular network model that is expressive for real devices, and propose new algorithms that can achieve low memory cost and fast update speed at the same time.
55 Check before You Change: Preventing Correlated Failures in Service Updates Ennan Zhai, Ang Chen, Ruzica Piskac, Mahesh Balakrishnan, Bingchuan Tian, Bo Song and Haoliang Zhang, This paper presents CloudCanary, a system that can perform real-time audits on service updates to identify the root causes of correlated failure risks, and generate improvement plans with increased reliability.
56 Towards Logically Centralized Interdomain Routing Shahrooz Pouryousef, Lixin Gao, and Arun Venkataramani, In this paper, we present the design and implementation of CIRCA, a logically centralized architecture and system for interdomain routing that enables operators to offload BGP-style route computation to the cloud while preserving the confidentiality of proprietary information.
57 Building An Elastic Query Engine on Disaggregated Storage Midhul Vuppalapati, Justin Miron, and Rachit Agarwal, Dan Truong, Ashish Motivala, and Thierry Cruanes, This paper presents Snowflake design and implementation, along with a discussion on how recent changes in cloud infrastructure (emerging hardware, fine-grained billing, etc.) have altered the many assumptions that guided the design and optimization of Snowflake system.
58 Near-Optimal Latency Versus Cost Tradeoffs in Geo-Distributed Storage Muhammed Uluyol, Anthony Huang, Ayush Goel, Mosharaf Chowdhury, and Harsha V. Madhyastha, We show that the key to addressing this sub-optimality is to 1) allow for erasure coding, not just replication, of data across data centers, and 2) mitigate the resultant increase in read and write latencies by rethinking how to enable consensus across the wide-area network.
59 Comb Decoding towards Collision-Free WiFi Shangqing Zhao, Zhe Qu, Zhengping Luo, Zhuo Lu, and Yao Liu, In this paper, we present a new design called comb decoding (CombDec) to efficiently resolve RTS collisions without changing the 802.11 standard.
60 Gryff: Unifying Consensus and Shared Registers Matthew Burke, Audrey Cheng and Wyatt Lloyd, We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of Gryff, a system that offers linearizability and low tail latency by unifying consensus with shared registers.
61 CableMon: Improving the Reliability of Cable Broadband Networks via Proactive Network Maintenance Jiyao Hu, Zhenyu Zhou, and Xiaowei Yang, Jacob Malone, Jonathan W Williams, In this paper, we propose CableMon, the first public-domain system that applies machine learning techniques to PNM data to improve the reliability of cable broadband networks.
62 Liveness Verification of Stateful Network Functions Farnaz Yousefi, Anubhavnidhi Abhashkumar and Kausik Subramanian, Kartik Hans, Soudeh Ghorbani, Aditya Akella, In this work, we provide a compositional programming abstraction that decouples reachability from stateful network functions.
63 Themis: Fair and Efficient GPU Cluster Scheduling Kshiteej Mahajan, Arjun Balasubramanian, Arjun Singhvi, Shivaram Venkataraman, and Aditya Akella, Amar Phanishayee, Shuchi Chawla, We propose Themis, a new scheduling framework for ML training workloads.
64 Programmable Calendar Queues for High-speed Packet Scheduling Naveen Kr. Sharma, Chenxingyu Zhao, and Ming Liu, Pravein G Kannan, Changhoon Kim, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Anirudh Sivaraman, In this paper, we revisit the Calendar Queue abstraction and show that it is an appropriate fit for scheduling algorithms that not only require prioritization but also perform dynamic escalation of packet priorities.
65 Learning Relaxed Belady for Content Distribution Network Caching Zhenyu Song, Daniel S. Berger, Kai Li and Wyatt Lloyd, This paper presents a new approach for caching in CDNs that uses machine learning to approximate the Belady MIN algorithm.