Marc Koerner
Dr. Marc Körner joined the ESnet network automation group in October 2019. Prior to that he worked as a lead engineer at a Bay Area startup, developing SDN based office network solutions in the network access provider domain. Before that he spent two years on an awarded postdoctoral fellowship at the UC Berkeley Netsys Lab group, the ICSI, and the EIT Digital Silicon Vally hub. He received a Dr.-Ing. degree (PhD equivalent) from the faculty of EECS at TU Berlin in 2015 for his dissertation on Software Defined Networking based Data Center Services, while he was working for the Complex and Distributed IT Systems department. Dr. Körner further holds a MEng degree in embedded systems, as well as a MSc equivalent university diploma in computer engineering. He has a total experience of around 15 years in academic research and industrial software development.
Overview:
Current work: OSCARS improvements
Prior work at ESnet: ESnet 6 NSO integration, Workflow Orchestrator
Research interests: Edge / Cloud Computing, NFV and SDN applications, Network ML applications and optimizations
All publications: google scholar
Papers and Presentations @ ESnet:
Conference Papers
Marc Koerner, “Vendor Agnostic Network Service Orchestration with Stacked NSO Services”, Proceedings of the 2023 - 19th International Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM), Niagara Falls, ON, Canada, IEEE, November 28, 2023, 4,
The Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) is the Department of Energy's internal wide area network provider, delivering connectivity for all US national laboratories including some satellite sites in Europe. The ESnet network is a highly reliable and high bandwidth network, which transports vast amounts of data between laboratories and supercomputing facilities. Thus, ESnet is supplying the scientific community with the connectivity requirements for all sorts of data analytics and simulations. One of the major goals within the ESnet6 deployment was to have an orchestrated and fully automated network configuration management system. Hence, ESnet is leveraging tools like the Cisco Network Service Orchestrator (NSO) to deploy router configuration in a centralized and also service oriented fashion. After building the first iteration of services following a significant optimization in the router configuration and eventually deployment time, ESnet decided to take advantage of the accumulated knowledge during the first implementation and started to revise the NSO service architecture. The first prototype using the revised architecture is currently getting implemented in scope of our management router based configuration service. This paper will elaborate on the advantages of minimum functional configuration based stacked service architecture in comparison to plain networks service model based design.
Presentation/Talks
Marc Koerner, Chris Cummings, Network Orchestration at ESnet, Cisco Automation Developer Days, December 4, 2023,
ESnet is the DOE’s internal research network WAN provider. The ESnet network is designed as a high bandwidth and jumbo-frame optimized network, capable of transporting vast amounts of data between US national laboratories and supercomputing facilities. Thus, ESnet is delivering end-to-end connectivity for the scientific community for all sorts of data analytics and simulations. One of the major goals for our latest network generation (ESnet6) was the objective to have a fully orchestrated and automated configuration management system. Therefore, ESnet is leveraging tools like the Cisco Network Services Orchestrator (NSO) to deploy router configuration in a centralized and also service oriented fashion. This talk will provide an overview and insights about the current state of our NSO services, as well as how NSO is getting utilized in our network orchestration stack.
Marc Koerner, ESnet’s Orchestration Perspective, Internet2 Tech Exchange 2023, September 18, 2023,
ESnet and Internet2 are using the Cisco Network Service Orchestrator (NSO) to automate and orchestrate network configuration by leveraging principles of intent based networking and vendor agnostic service abstraction. This talk will give a brief overview of ESnet’s and Internet2’s NSO service architecture, the lessons learned, and the impacts of the overall software development process. ESnet will present a more granular umbrella service redesign, as well as the resulting strategy for the NSO service refactoring within ESnet’s network orchestration stack. Internet2 will present it’s current architecture and how we’re leveraging NSO to support the upcoming Insight Console Virtual Networks.
