Transcraft:
An End-to-End Framework for Network Transport Design and Implementation for Emerging Applications

NSF Award CNS-2403026

Principal investigators

Daehyeok Kim (PI, University of Texas at Austin)
Aditya Akella (Co-PI, University of Texas at Austin)
Venkat Arun (Co-PI, University of Texas at Austin)

Synopsis

Data center networks rapidly evolve with higher speeds and increased programmability, accommodating various communication endpoints such as central processing units, graphics processing units, and other accelerators. Emerging applications, particularly in artificial intelligence and high-performance computing, require efficient data transport across networks. Traditional transport stacks struggle to meet these demands, necessitating redesign and adaptability. This project develops an end-to-end framework called Transcraft to streamline the design and implementation of network transport stacks. Transcraft aims to reduce development time and costs by providing an intuitive interface for developers to quickly create and verify transport design and implementation.

Our approach

This project addresses key challenges in computer networking, systems, and formal methods. It introduces techniques for specifying and verifying infrastructure constraints, workload requirements, and objectives, enabling automatic design synthesis based on formal specifications. To assist developers, Transcraft offers an intuitive interface for specifying properties and encoding pseudocode, which is iteratively refined through formal verification techniques. Additionally, this project will develop reusable templates for transport blocks, ensuring efficient integration and performance optimization across various platforms. Transcraft also includes benchmarks for performance tuning and validation tailored to workloads, properties, and configurations.

Potential impacts

This project will benefit practitioners and students by releasing open-source tools, models, implementations, and benchmarks, fostering innovation and learning. Research findings will be integrated into courses spanning networking, computer systems, and formal methods, enhancing educational programs. Collaboration with industry partners will ensure the effectiveness of Transcraft in diverse settings and promote its adoption. Additionally, this project will organize workshops and tutorials to share insights with practitioners and continue to mentor undergraduates and underrepresented communities, supporting educational and diversity initiatives.

The open-source software, hardware, data, and results will be available for public use under a permissive open-source license on this website.