Datacenters are hyper-scale distributed systems with massive compute and storage resources, often considered as the fundamental building block for the era of Cloud Computing. Datacenter networking, responsible for hyper-connecting those distributed compute and storage resources to form a unified computing platform, is critical to underpin the datacenter infrastructure. 

The first part of this report focuses on the architecture of the datacenter networking. Based on the advanced research results and industry practice, this talk discusses the control plane, management plane and data plane of a modern datacenter networking architecture, elaborating on the design of (1) a  micro-service based control system for Software Defined Networking; (2) a dynamic modeling system for heterogeneous networks; and (3) a micro-kernel based host networking system. 

The second part of this report focuses on the thoughts on the innovations of next-generation network architecture, inspired by the designs and operations of large-scale datacenter networks. At its core, this part discusses how to reap (or partially reap) the benefits of datacenter networking (such as controllable interdomain routing and bandwidth guarantee) in open, decentralized, and trustless networks. 

Zhuotao Liu is a tenure-track assistant professor in Institute of Network Sciences and Cyberspace at Tsinghua University. He was a technical lead at Google Network Infrastructure team and Google Global Networking team from 2017.08 to 2021.02. Prior to that, he earned a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2017.07, and a B.E. in Electrical Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2012.07. 

Zhuotao’s primary research areas are Internet Security & Privacy, Blockchain Infrastructure, Datacenter Networking, and Machine Learning Systems. He earned two “Feats of Engineering” awards at Google for datacenter capacity augment and network availability improvement, respectively. In 2017, he received the NSF national Innovation Corps grant for contributions in commercialization of innovations. He received three consecutive national scholarships as an undergraduate.