Operating Systems Abstractions for Software Packet Processing in Datacenters

Over the past decade, the modern datacenter has reshaped the computing landscape by providing a large scale consolidated platform that efficiently powers online services, fi-nancial, military, scientific, and other application domains. The fundamental principle at the core of the datacenter design is to provide a highly available, high performance computing and storage infrastructure while relying solely on low cost, commodity com-ponents. Further, in the past few years, entire datacenters have become a commodity themselves, and are increasingly being networked with each other through high speed optical networks for load balancing and fault tolerance. Therefore, the network substrate has become a key component that virtually all operations within and between datacen-ters rely on. Although the datacenter network substrate is fast and provisioned with large amounts of capacity to spare, networked applications find it increasingly difficult to derive the expected levels of performance. In essence, datacenters consist of inex-pensive, fault-prone components running on commodity operating systems and network protocols that are ill-suited for reliable, high-performance applications. This thesis ad-dresses several key challenges pertaining to the communication substrate of the moder