NDA

NDA (Network Design Automation) is our vision to create a set of tools -- analogous to those created for designing chips -- but this time for designing and operating networks.  Here is a recent presentation I gave at a 2020 IFIP keynote that describes our vision for NDA and some example tools.  Much of the initial work in this field is in network verification where we create network-specific formal methods. I describe intuitively why network verification can scale to large networks in the following  blog post.  Our current work tries to finesse the needs for specifications and our tools developed at UCLA are having impact: Self-Starter is being used in the Microsoft wide area, CAMPION has found bugs in Alibaba's cloud, and GRoot found bugs at Akamai and Microsoft DNS zone files  We have been funded by Adobe, Cisco, Facebook, Google, and Huawei. I have also worked on a different aspect of NDA: creating hardware programmable routers and router compilers which helped start the P4 standard