NBA (Network Balancing Act)

"A High-performance packet processing framework for heterogeneous processors," EuroSys 2015 paper

Notice for paper readers

• The IDS source code is not available to the public, as it contains a derivation from industry-transferred code from Kargus.
  • You could refer to other open-source code, such as a GPU implementation of the Aho-Corasick algorithm in Snap.
• We used Intel DPDK v1.7 for the EuroSys 2015 paper, but have now upgraded to v2.0+.

Main Features

• 80-Gbps packet processing with modular programming interface similar to Click.
• GPU offloading to boost complex computations such as IPsec encryption
• Automatic CPU/GPU load balancing to maximize the overall throughput

Documentation

See the documentation online.

Ongoing work

• Full datablock implementation
  • Base implementation is done but there remains room for performance optimization
• Decreasing GPU latency
  • Optimization for consequent offloadable modules: merge two separate offload-tasks into one
  • "Adaptive" batching
• OpenCL engine (primarily for Intel Xeon Phi)
• (Semi-)automated conversion of existing Click elements to NBA elements