A lot of what "everyone knows" about network protocols is, actually, false. Very few people know anything more than the details of one approach, and the field is clouded with hype, and rivalry between competing teams. Very little is intrinsically true, since any of the designs can be changed to answer any criticism, or unfavorable comparison with another approach. This talk covers a variety of topics, including advice on how to get to the heart of what might be intrinsic differences, separate out orthogonal issues rather than focusing on complete specifications, and compare technologies without emotion. We'll discuss various technologies for cloud "fabrics" (networks), including Ethernet, Infiniband, TRILL, IP, OpenFlow, etc.

Biography

Radia Perlman is a Fellow at Intel Labs, specializing on network protocols and security protocols. Many of the technologies she designed have been deployed in the Internet for decades, including the IS-IS routing protocol, many of the ideas of which were also deployed in the OSPF routing protocol, and the spanning tree algorithm that has been the heart of Ethernet. More recently she invented the concept of TRILL, which improves upon spanning tree while still "being Ethernet". She has also made contributions to network security, including assured delete of data, design of the authentication handshake of IPSec, trust models for PKI, and network infrastructure robust against malicious trusted components. She is the author of the textbook "Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches, and Internetworking Protocols", and coauthor of "Network Security". She has a PhD from MIT in computer science, and has received various industry awards including lifetime achievement awards from ACM's SIGCOMM and Usenix, and an honorary doctorate from KTH.