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  • > 2003: The goal of the 100×100 project was to create communication architectures that could provide 100Mb/s networking for all 100 million American homes.

    Well you failed horribly.

    > The project brought together researchers from Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, Berkeley, and AT&T.

    I think I see why.

    > This research led to the 4D architecture for logically centralized network control of a distributed data plane

    What? How was this meant to benefit citizens?

    > Datacenter owners grew frustrated with the cost and complexity of the commercially available networking equipment; a typical datacenter switch cost more than $20,000 and a hyperscaler needed about 10,000 switches per site. They decided they could build their own switch box for about $2,000 using off-the-shelf switching chips from companies such as Broadcom and Marvell

    What role did the NSF play here? It sounds like basic economics did most of the actual work.

    > The start-up company Nicira, which emerged from the NSF-funded Ethane project, developed the Network Virtualization Platform (NVP)26 to meet this need

    Which seems to have _zero_ mentions outside of academic papers.

    by themafia
  • what a wonderful chronicle of how esoteric research became not-esoteric, and truly world-changing, and how the NSF enabled it

    pour one out for the NSF folks. RIP </3

    by heathermiller
  • I worked with a quite few of the folks mentioned in this article when I was at the Open Networking Foundation, if anyone has questions.
    by zdw
  • > a network should have logically centralized control, where the control software has network-wide visibility and direct control across the distributed collection of network devices.

    Including a backdoor for wiretapping in SDN-enabled routers.

    by Animats
  • What’s the current state of SDN development these days?

    I remember working on related projects about ten years ago in grad school, and even back then it felt like a somewhat naive and overhyped form of “engineering innovation.”

    Take OpenFlow, for example — every TCP connection had to go through the controller to set up a per-connection flow match entry for the path. It always struck me as a bit absurd.

    At the time, the main push came from Stanford’s “clean slate” networking project led by Prof. Nick McKeown. They spun off things like Open vSwitch, Big Switch Networks, and even open-source router efforts like NetFPGA. Later, the professor went back into industry.

    Looking back, the whole movement feels like a startup-driven experiment that got heavily “packaged” but never really solved any fundamental problem. I mean, traditional distributed-routing-based network gear was already working fine — didn’t they already have admin interfaces for configuration anyway (or call that admin interface SDN )? lol ~

    by coreyzzp
  • The 10-year research-to-production timeline is the key lesson. Today's funding (VC or government grants) demands results in 2-3 years. We've systematically eliminated the "patient capital" that creates foundational infrastructure imho...
    by SurceBeats

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