Title: Crossbow - Network stack virtualization & Resource control
Speaker: Sunay Tripathy, Sun Microsystems
Date: 10/19/2005, 1pm, Packard 101

Abstract: Crossbow allows creation of virtual stacks around any
service (HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, NFS, etc.), protocol (TCP, UDP, SCTP,
etc.), or Solaris Containers. The virtual stacks are separated by
means to H/W classification engine such that traffic for one stack
does not impact other virtual stacks. Each virtual stack can be
assigned its own priority and B/W on a shared NIC without causing
performance degradation to the system or the service/ container. The
architecture dynamically manages priority and bandwidth resources, and
can provide better defense against denial-of-service attacks directed
at a particular service or container by isolating the impact just to
that service or container.

Bio: 
Sunay is the senior staff engineer for the Solaris Networking and
Security Technology group. He has designed, developed, and led
projects in the Sun Solaris kernel/network environment to provide new
functionality, performance, and scalability.

He is the architect and tech lead for the redesign of the Solaris
network stack, code named FireEngine. The new architecture allows the
system to vertically partition the workload using an IP
classifier-based, lock-less design. It reduces the overhead of
synchronization and cross communication between CPUs, which can
significantly increase performance and scalability.

Sunay was one of the key people behind Network Cache and Accelerator
(NCA), which provides an alternate path from the sockets layer all the
way down to the device driver. It also produced significant
performance improvements for web-type workloads over the
pre-FireEngine Solaris stack.

He was also responsible for the introduction of the Sendfilev system
call and support in the Solaris 8 OS. He was part of the team that
brought 64-bit networking to the Solaris 7 OS.

Before coming to Sun, Sunay was a researcher at the Indian Institute
of Technology, Delhi for four years. During a two-year stint at
Stanford, he was also involved with the Center of Design Research
creating smart agents and was part of the Mosquito Net group
experimenting with mobility in IP networks.