RouteBricks: exploiting parallelism to scale software routers

  • Authors:
  • Mihai Dobrescu;Norbert Egi;Katerina Argyraki;Byung-Gon Chun;Kevin Fall;Gianluca Iannaccone;Allan Knies;Maziar Manesh;Sylvia Ratnasamy

  • Affiliations:
  • EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland;Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom;EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland;Intel Research, Berkeley, USA;Intel Research, Berkeley, USA;Intel Research, Berkeley, USA;Intel Research, Berkeley, USA;Intel Research, Berkeley, USA;Intel Research, Berkeley, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the ACM SIGOPS 22nd symposium on Operating systems principles
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

We revisit the problem of scaling software routers, motivated by recent advances in server technology that enable high-speed parallel processing--a feature router workloads appear ideally suited to exploit. We propose a software router architecture that parallelizes router functionality both across multiple servers and across multiple cores within a single server. By carefully exploiting parallelism at every opportunity, we demonstrate a 35Gbps parallel router prototype; this router capacity can be linearly scaled through the use of additional servers. Our prototype router is fully programmable using the familiar Click/Linux environment and is built entirely from off-the-shelf, general-purpose server hardware.