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FLICK: Developing and running application-specific network services

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Conference Object

Change log

Authors

Alim, A 
Clegg, RG 
Mai, L 
Rupprecht, L 
Seckler, E 

Abstract

Data centre networks are increasingly programmable, with application-specific network services proliferating, from custom load-balancers to middleboxes providing caching and aggregation. Developers must currently implement these services using traditional low-level APIs, which neither support natural operations on application data nor provide efficient performance isolation.

We describe FLICK, a framework for the programming and execution of application-specific network services on multi-core CPUs. Developers write network services in the FLICK language, which offers high-level processing constructs and application-relevant data types. FLICK programs are translated automatically to efficient, parallel task graphs, implemented in C++ on top of a user-space TCP stack. Task graphs have bounded resource usage at runtime, which means that the graphs of multiple services can execute concurrently without interference using cooperative scheduling. We evaluate FLICK with several services (an HTTP load-balancer, a Memcached router and a Hadoop data aggregator), showing that it achieves good performance while reducing development effort.

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Keywords

Journal Title

Proceedings of the 2016 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, USENIX ATC 2016

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

USENIX Association
Sponsorship
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/K031724/2)
EPSRC (via University of Nottingham) (RIS 34455)
European Commission Horizon 2020 (H2020) Industrial Leadership (IL) (645124)
European Commission (317756)
European Commission (288021)
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/K034723/1)
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council