Taurus: An Intelligent Data Plane

Emerging applications -- cloud computing, the internet of things, and augmented/virtual reality -- need responsive, available, secure, ubiquitous, and scalable datacenter networks. Network management currently uses simple, per-packet, data-plane heuristics (e.g., ECMP and sketches) under an intelligent, millisecond-latency control plane that runs data-driven performance and security policies. However, to meet users' quality-of-service expectations in a modern data center, networks must operate intelligently at line rate. In this paper, we present Taurus, an intelligent data plane capable of machine-learning inference at line rate. Taurus adds custom hardware based on a map-reduce abstraction to programmable network devices, such as switches and NICs; this new hardware uses pipelined and SIMD parallelism for fast inference. Our evaluation of a Taurus-enabled switch ASIC -- supporting several real-world benchmarks -- shows that Taurus operates three orders of magnitude faster than a server-based control plane, while increasing area by 24% and latency, on average, by 178 ns. On the long road to self-driving networks, Taurus is the equivalent of adaptive cruise control: deterministic rules steer flows, while machine learning tunes performance and heightens security.