Andy Fingerhut

LinkedIn or bio: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andy-fingerhut-8ab969/

How long have been working on the P4 Project?

I started in 2017

What contributions have you made in the past to the P4 Project?

Co-chair of the P4 Architecture working group

Authoring a significant fraction of the Portable Switch Architecture specification

Active participation in the P4 language design work group and P4 API work group

Numerous clarifications and enhancements to the P4 language specification, and bug reports, test programs, and bug fixes for the open source P4 compiler and development tools.

What are you actively working on in the P4 Project?

Completing the open source implementation of the Portable Switch Architecture

Early work on a Portable NIC Architecture specification

Several additions to the P4 language specification related to those.

Why do you feel you would be a good candidate for this position?

I have a good depth of knowledge of data networking from 25 years of working in academia and industry, and have a strong interest in, and ability to, help drive P4 forward.

Are there any changes you would like to bring to the community if elected into this position?

None that come to mind, that are not already in progress at this time.

Sándor Laki

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/s%C3%A1ndor-laki-667304a4/
Website: https://lakis.web.elte.hu/

Bio: SÁNDOR LAKI received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from ELTE Eötvös Loránd University in 2007 and 2015, respectively. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Information Systems, ELTE Eötvös Loránd University. Since 2018 he has led the Communication Networks Laboratory (CNL) research group, which was established by Ericsson and ELTE. He has authored more than 60 peer-reviewed articles and demo articles, including publications in journals like IEEE JSAC, IEEE ToN, IEEE TNSM, and conferences like IEEE INFOCOM and USENIX NSDI. His research interests include traffic management and QoS, non-traditional approaches for resource sharing, programmable traffic management, programmable data planes, and their application in traditional networking and other use cases (e.g., in-network computing). He is a P4 enthusiast, the "father" of T4P4S P4-to-DPDK transpiler, and an active contributor to ONF's P4 project. He took part in the work of the Traffic Management subWG a few years ago. Currently, he contributes to developing the P4Pi Educational platform within the Education WG. He was the co-organizer of two P4Pi Hackathons held at ACM SIGCOMM 2021 and 2022. He's been in the TPC of EuroP4 for several years.

How long have you been working on the P4 Project?

My first commits (bug fixes) to the P4 Project were in 2016. Currently, I contribute to the P4Pi subproject.

What contributions have you made in the past to the P4 Project?

My first commits to the P4 Project were a few bug fixes back in 2016 when we started developing our DPDK-based P4 compiler called T4P4S which is open source. Then I participated in the Traffic Management (TM) subWorking Group led by Steve Ibanez, working on different AQM implementations in P4. In 2021, I started working with Noa Zilberman and Robert Soulé from the Education WG on a new P4 education platform that is based on a Raspberry PI single-board computer. We've named the platform P4Pi. Since then, my main contribution to the P4 Project relates to the development of P4Pi. In addition, I've also contributed to a range of P4-based in-network computing applications, ranging from processing sensor streams to robot control. In 2022, I also led a side project called P4Edge where we ported the P4Pi software stack to a more powerful hardware target (PcEngines APU) and investigated the performance of various P4 backends including P4-eBPF. 

What are you actively working on in the P4 Project?

I'm actively working on the P4Pi educational platform of the P4 Project.

Why do you feel you would be a good candidate for this position?

I've actively worked with P4 since almost the beginning of the language. As a TST member, I could represent two new aspects: 1) investigating how P4 can be used as a technology enabler in industrial networks using rigid protocols or in the IoT domain, and 2) extending the scope of the P4Pi educational platform in terms of training materials and examples, and involve new hardware targets with better performance suitable for research or other near-edge use cases (e.g., IoT gateways, etc.). I believe that my research background, the experiences of P4Pi and our local project P4Edge can help me progress in these areas.

Are there any changes you would like to bring to the community if elected into this position?

I would like to work on extending the P4 project to more users and new contributors. For this effort, P4Pi provides a good basis even though its performance is below what is expected in real-world use cases. I believe that providing good training materials and alternative hardware targets for the P4Pi software stack could attract other contributors to P4Pi and the whole P4 project.

Fernando Ramos

LinkedIn or Bio: I am an Associate Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon (ULisboa), where I teach computer networking (mainly), systems and computer architecture topics. I am the coordinator of our Master's Programme on Telecommunications and Informatics Engineering. I am a senior researcher at INESC-ID, where I head the Distributed, Parallel, and Secure Systems Scientific Area, a research group of 130+ people, including ~20 faculty members. Previous positions include academic and research roles at the Faculty of Sciences ULisboa, University of Cambridge, Telefonica Research Barcelona, and Altice Labs, among others, totalling 20+ years of teaching and researching. I hold a PhD from the University of Cambridge and an MSc from the Queen Mary University of London. I have participated in 10+ international projects and am currently the coordinator of the 8M€ EU Horizon ACES project and PI of a (smaller, except on ambition) national project called Myriarch. I am the author or co-author of 60+ scientific publications, totalling 7200+ citations (GSC) at this date.

How long have you been working on the P4 Project?

My involvement with the P4 project started in 2018, with initial contributions to the P4 Education WG.

What contributions have you made in the past to the P4 Project?

My main contributions are related to using P4 in Education and trying to be a "P4 evangelist" in Europe. Specifically:

-- I am chair of the P4 Education WG (since 2021)
-- I was involved in the organization of the five EuroP4 workshops in Europe:
- general co-chair of the EuroP4 workshop in 2021 (with ANCS, virtual) and 2022 (with CoNEXT, in Rome)
- PC co-chair of EuroP4 workshops in 2019 and 2020
- PC member of the 1st EuroP4 workshop in Europe (called P4WE at the time) 
-- I helped co-organise the recent P4Pi hackathon in SIGCOMM’22, and the P4 tutorial in NetSoft’22

What are you actively working on in the P4 Project?

I am currently the P4 Education WG Chair.

Why do you feel you would be a good candidate for this position?

I have 20+ years of experience teaching and researching computer networking. I introduced P4 in my advanced computer networking course back in 2015, and I have had several years of experience doing research involving P4 since then on various topics, including monitoring, security, virtualization, and program synthesis. My leadership, organizational, and coordination skills may also be helpful for this position.

Are there any changes you would like to bring to the community if elected into this position?

I would not call these changes, but if elected, I would like to give focus on three topics in particular:

- the evolution of P4 from a "switch-centric" language towards a more general language for packet processors based on radically different architectures: from programmable switches to SmartNICs of different kinds (FPGA-based, DPUs/IPUs, etc.) to end-host networking (I'm thinking in vswitches but also projects like P4TC). Given the new networking landscape, I think the P4 Portable NIC Architecture should continue to be a core P4 project in the next few years. So, engaging further (and enlarging) the community around it is essential.

- a reflection on if and how the "revolution" programmable networks (SDN, P4) brought to computer networking should change computer networking education. How should computer networking curricula adapt to respond to the changing landscape? Do we need to reinvent computer networking textbooks, or are incremental changes enough?

- extend the scope of P4 to other regions outside the US and Europe. The P4 community in Europe has grown significantly in the past few years, and there are also already several events in Asia (Taiwan, Japan, China) that are demonstrative of the growing interest in the language. South America could soon be an area of growth for the P4 community, as there are already several research groups (for instance, in Brazil) with interest and relevant work on P4. Africa should not be left behind. We could engage with the IETF/IRTF GAIA WG (Global Access to the Internet for All) community to leverage their recognized knowledge of these often digitally excluded areas. This engagement could be a starting point to investigate new use cases for P4 and to "enlarge the P4 tent" (as a well-known community member put it a decade ago, in a related, yet different, context :-).

Fabian Ruffy

LinkedIn or Bio: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fruffy/

How long have you been working on the P4 Project?

Since 2018.

What contributions have you made in the past to the P4 Project?

I have developed a testing framework for the eBPF/XDP P4C back ends. I have been maintaining P4C's continuous testing infrastructure. I have developed several testing tools that have found hundreds of bugs in P4C. I have contributed a series of bug fixes to P4C and the behavioral model.

What are you actively working on in the P4 Project?

A test oracle that can produce input-output tests for any P4 target architecture. This tool is already a back end in P4C.

Why do you feel you would be a good candidate for this position?

I have vested interest in seeing P4 succeed as a project and language and will do so in the foreseeable future. I have also interacted with most of the members of the community and I am an active contributor to the project in various ways.

Are there any changes you would like to bring to the community if elected into this position?

I want to reduce the barriers of adoption of P4lang projects. I believe one avenue to do so is to improve the tooling for the P4 language itself. This includes the development of linters, language servers, syntactical highlighters. Furthermore, I want to support projects that reduce the friction of installing and using P4lang projects. This involves the development of appropriate packaging, documentation, versioning, and testing. Compared to other major open-source projects, P4 is several lacking in ease of use.