Hardware p4 (Tofino) switch available in CloudLab

[Robert Ricci]

We're happy to announce that we have one Tofino switch, which supports
p4-controlled packet forwarding planes in hardware, available for
immediate use at the Utah CloudLab site.

This switch is allocated to one user at a time to give users full
programmability without the restrictions that come from multi-tenancy.
In essence, the switch is allocated like a regular node, as are our
other existing user-controlled switches [1].

It is connected to eight of our c6525-100g nodes at 100 Gb, and has
sixteen 'loopback' links wired to itself to emulate multi-switch
topologies. We have prepared a profile [2] that demonstrates it use.

We note that due to restrictive licensing terms from Intel, which owns
Tofino, use of the P4 Studio SDE to compile code for this switch
requires membership in the Intel Connectivity Research Program [3],
which is free to join.

[1]
http://docs.cloudlab.us/advanced-topics.html#%28part._user-controlled-switches%29

[2] https://www.cloudlab.us/p/uic-dcs/tofino-sde

[3]
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/network-io/programmable-ethernet-switch/connectivity-education-hub/research-program.html