Network projects list. In our 10-Year Assessments, projects are identified that address system reliability issues, economic benefits, regional issues, loss savings, public policy requirements, transmission service issues, generation or distribution interconnections, or any combination of the above.
Feel free to issue a pull request to make any change to the existing list or add net new projects.
Note: Please keep the descriptions concise and also include a link if you are going to add a project.
Established in April 2013 is an open source Software Defined Networking (SDN) controller platform(s). There are different controller platforms for different use cases.
Established in the late 2000s, the OpenFlow 1.0 release launched in December 2009. The Open Networking Foundation took over the development (not actually coding) of OpenFlow when ONF formed in late March / early April in 2010.
Established in mid to late 2009 by the Nicira team to replace the standard Linux bridge. It’s goal was to provide full featured switching capabilities to virtual environments running in Linux based hypervisors such as KVM and XEN. It’s also now being used to inter-connect containers.
Just established last week and will be a sub project of the OVS project. Its goal is to provide native abstractions to OVS to simplify the provisioning of logical segments, logical routers, and security groups without requiring a SDN controller (initially for OpenStack environments).
Formerly known as Quantum, it is the core networking project and API for the OpenStack project. For networks to be orchestrated by OpenStack, they must have a neutron plug in. It officially became a core project in the OpenStack Folsom release.
Launched in early 2014 by Cisco as a way to create, deploy, and manage policies. It’s initially being used as part of the Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) solution. Cisco has also submitted it to the IETF and is contributing work around OpFlex to the ODL and OpenStack Neutron communities. The OpFlex project consists of three things: the OpFlex protocol, SB plugin, and the policy agent.
Initially created in 2013 by Plexxi, the DSE has become part of the OpenStack Congress project (focused on policy). The DSE could revolutionize how different products and solutions communicate with one another. I’ll go out on a limb and say it could be the foundation for machine learning in the data center (and IT, more generally).
This one has been around for some time, but is gaining more visibility with companies like Cumulus actively promoting open networking. Quagga is a routing software suite and has open source implementations of OSPF, RIP, BGP, etc.
Juniper acquired Contrail, a network virtualization company, in December 2012. Shortly after, they open sourced the product and called it OpenContrail.
The network virtualization product by Midokura was just open sourced less than 3 months ago. Like a few other startups and solutions out there, they have been primarily focused on networking for OpenStack clouds.
Created by Cumulus Networks in 2012 and later adopted by the Open Compute Project (OCP), it is a lightweight operating system serving as a boot loader for bare metal switches allowing users to have choice in which operating systems can be used and loaded. Cumulus, Big Switch, OCP, Pica8, Dell, and Plexxi (they’ve committed to it, but don’t know where they stand) are now shipping switches with ONIE pre-installed and/or support ONIE in their software. You can find plenty whitebox/bare metal platforms that ship with ONIE that will allow you to load network operating systems like Cumulus Linux, Open Networking Linux, PicOS, etc.
Has been around since 2011 initially established by Facebook to share some of their hardware designs, but also to help accelerate hardware and software innovation in the open source world. OCP Networking was later established in early to mid 2013, publicly launched at Interop in 2013. It’s since been working on open source architectures for data center top of rack switches.
Created by Cumulus in 2013 as a way to dynamically verify there is up to date and accurate cabling in place in switched networks. This is great and I do hope other vendors adopt PTM. I’ve been developing external (off box) functionality to do the same thing. Check out my blog for more details.
Emerged onto the scene in late 2013 by Big Switch Networks and is now part of the Open Compute Project (OCP). ONL is a base level Linux distribution for bare metal switches. One of its main goals is to be the foundation of which others/vendors can build commercial solutions on top of bare-metal switches. Big Switch’s SwitchLight OS is an example, and is built on top of ONL.
Similar to Quagga, it is an open source routing platform for Linux systems. In contrast to Quagga, BIRD offers multiple-RIB design, is often used as a route server, and does not support ISIS. On the other hand, Quagga is a single-RIB design, supports ISIS, and it’s not even recommended to be used as a route server.
Many are aware of Snort, but it’s an open source IDS/IPS; its commercial version came via SourceFire, a company which Cisco acquired in 2013.
ExaBGP is an application designed to provide an easy way for programmers and system admistrators to interact with BGP networks. The program is designed to allow the injection of arbitrary routes into a network, including IPv6 and FlowSpec. A common use case is to run ExaBGP on a server, create high availability architectures, anycasting, load balancer replacement and more.
Introduced in late 2014, ONOS is a new open source entrant into the SDN controller space. It has the backing of primarily service providers and is intended to be 'carrier grade'. It includes some interesting distributed systems components such as Apache Zookeeper for leader election, coordindation and consensus and Titan for the graph database. Competes with OpenDaylight.
A network virtualization platform that sits in between an Openflow controller and the physical network. OVX is a network hypervisor that can create multiple virtual and programmable networks on top of a single physical infrastructure. Each tenant can use the full addressing space, specify their own topology, and deploy the network OS of their choice. Networks are reconfigurable at run-time, and OVX can automatically recover from physical network failures.
A network simulator for SDN research and education. Mininet creates a realistic virtual network, running real kernel, switch and application code, on a single machine (VM, cloud or native) for interactively testing networking software.
There are plenty more open source projects that will directly impact networking too. A few of them include:
There are plenty of these still out there, many in academia
Git, Gerrit, Jenkins, Travis CI
Open source tooling for source control, code review, testing, and continuous integration. These aren’t too popular in the network community, but they can definitely have a positive impact.
SocketPlane, Weave, Akanda
New onto the network scene, SocketPlane and Weave are building open source networking solutions for Docker and Akanda (spin out from Dreamhost) is building an open source network virtualization platform for OpenStack environments.
Ansible, Puppet, Chef, SaltStack, etc.
Here is an increasing amount of open source automation and configuration management tools that have been around for quite some time, but we’re just starting to see what kind of impact and what the integrations will look like for the network community
And we can’t forget about OpenNMS, Zenoss Core, Nagios Core, etc. If you want to add more to this list, feel free to write in or comment below.
If you think the latest enterprise and consumer network and computer technologies rolling into your data center and being snuck into your offices by end users are advanced, wait until you see what's cooking in the labs at universities and tech companies. Much of well-funded research is aimed at security, simplifying use of current technology and figuring out how to more easily plow through mounds of big data. Here's at peek at 10 projects.
Idiot-proof Smartphone Charging
Microsoft researchers are working on technology to make smartphone charging much less of a burden for users. The techniques being explored include an image-processing technique for detecting and locating smartphones in an office as well as solar/photovoltaic cell technology that works indoors to AutoCharge phones via a beam of light.
The prototype developed showed evidence of being able to charge phones as fast as wire-based solutions, according to the researchers, and easier to use than current wireless charging techniques that require users to put their phones on a charging pad.
Lazy Supercomputing
You’d think there’s nothing lazy at all these days about supercomputing given how fast these beasts process data, but computer scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility are taking what they call a lazy approach to making the machines run more efficiently.
More specifically, the researchers are seeking a better way of “checkpointing” applications, that is, storing info about the app’s state. They want to avoid checkpointing too often on high-performance computers, but want to do it enough so that if there is an app or system failure that minimal work will be lost. Their notion based upon their research is that errors tend to cluster around an original hardware failure, so checkpointing frequency should be increased at that point, but then eased off once things settle down. Such lazy checkpointing could reduce I/O volume 20% to 30%, and that would give supercomputers a real performance boost.
Getting a Fast Start
Cornell University researchers, along with colleagues from the University of Connecticut and other institutions, recently published a paper in the journal Nature that describes a theoretical and experimental discovery involving the use of a multiferroic material (bismuth ferrite) to build a memory device that conjures up visions of lightweight computers that start up even faster than some of today’s quick-start offerings.
Their advance would potentially allow for smaller, more reliable and less energy-intensive devices by getting around the need to use electric currents to encode data even at room temperature. While their breakthrough is promising, they made just a single device, and it would take billions of them to build a usable computer memory system, according to Cornell.
MORE:13 More Cool Network & Computing Research Projects
Exploring the Cloud
The National Science Foundation is devoting $10 million for a multi-school effort to build better cloud computing infrastructure that’s so important for researchers in fields spanning from physics to medicine to genetics.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Utah and Clemson University will each operate interconnected large-scale data centers for CloudLab, which will enable researchers in networking, storage and security to examine ways to bolster the cloud. Vendors such as Cisco will align with the schools on the project. The University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Raytheon BBN Technologies and US Ignite are also key players in the CloudLab effort.
University of Wisconsin computer science professor Aditya Akella said in a statement that “Almost all major services we depend on today rely on cloud computing. Our digital and physical lives are increasingly shaped by modern-day clouds.”
Another $10 NSF-funded experimental cloud project, dubbed Chameleon, is anchored by the University of Chicago and the University of Texas at Austin, which will oversee a giant reconfigurable cloud infrastructure boasting 650 nodes and 5 terabytes of storage. This bare-metal cloud infrastructure is designed to enable researchers to work with new virtualization technologies.
Coder Helper
Rice University researchers lead a four-year project backed by $11 million from DARPA to create a tool called PLINY designed to autocomplete and autocorrect code for programmers.
“Imagine the power of having all the code that has ever been written in the past available to programmers at their fingertips as they write new code or fix old code,”