Lyra: A Cross-Platform Language and Compiler for Data Plane Programming on Heterogeneous ASICs

Programmable data plane has been moving towards deployments in data centers as mainstream vendors of switching ASICs enable programmability in their newly launched products, such as Broadcom's Trident-4, Intel/Barefoot's Tofino, and Cisco's Silicon One. However, current data plane programs are written in low-level, chip-specific languages (e.g., P4 and NPL) and thus tightly coupled to the chip-specific architecture. As a result, it is arduous and error-prone to develop, maintain, and composite data plane programs in production networks. This paper presents Lyra, the first cross-platform, high-level language & compiler system that aids the programmers in programming data planes efficiently. Lyra offers a one-big-pipeline abstraction that allows programmers to use simple statements to express their intent, without laboriously taking care of the details in hardware; Lyra also proposes a set of synthesis and optimization techniques to automatically compile this "big-pipeline" program into multiple pieces of runnable chip-specific code that can be launched directly on the individual programmable switches of the target network. We built and evaluated Lyra. Lyra not only generates runnable real-world programs (in both P4 and NPL), but also uses up to 87.5% fewer hardware resources and up to 78% fewer lines of code than human-written programs.