Host Bypassing: Let your GPU speak Ethernet
Key: KAM+22
Author: Ralf Kundel, Leonard Anderweit, Jonas Markussen, Carsten Griwodz, Osama Abboud, Benjamin Becker, Tobias Meuser
Date: June 2022
Kind: In proceedings
Publisher: IEEE
Book title: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft)
Keywords: PCIe, GPU, NFV, Offloading, Bypassing, DPDK
Abstract: Hardware acceleration of network functions is essential to meet the challenging Quality of Service requirements in nowadays computer networks. Graphical Processing Units (GPU) are a widely deployed technology that can also be used for computing tasks, including acceleration of network functions. In this work, we demonstrate how commodity GPUs, which do not provide any network interfaces, can be used to accelerate network functions. Our approach leverages PCIe peer-to-peer capabilities and allows the GPU to control the network interface card directly, without any assistance from the operating system or control application. The presented evaluation results demonstrate the feasibility of our approach and its performance of up to 10 Gbit/s, even for small packets.
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