P4 (www.p4.org) is a programming language for describing how network packets should be processed on a variety of targets ranging from general-purpose CPUs to network processors, FPGAs, and custom ASICs. This tutorial will provide participants with a hands-on introduction to the P4 language. Attendees will learn how to express conventional and novel data-plane applications in P4, and how to compile, execute, and evaluate P4 programs using Mininet, a network emulation framework. Participants will be expected to bring their own laptops. We will provide a VM image containing all the necessary packages and tools.


The registration form is available online.

Robert Soulé is an assistant professor at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) and a Research Scientist at Barefoot Networks. His research interests are in distributed systems, networking, and applied programming languages. Prior to joining USI, he was a postdoctoral associate at Cornell University. He received his PhD from New York University in 2012, and his BA from Brown University in 1999. For two years, he was a research co-op in the Data Intensive Systems and Analytics Group at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. He is the recipient of an IBM Invention Plateau Award, a Google Faculty Research Award, and Best Paper Awards at ACM DEBS 2012 and USENIX NSDI 2018.