RouteBricks: exploiting parallelism to scale software routers

We revisit the problem of scaling software routers, motivated by recent advances in server technology that enable highspeed 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.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: SOSP
• Authors: Mihai Dobrescu, Norbert Egi, Katerina J. Argyraki, Byung-Gon Chun, Kevin R. Fall, Gianluca Iannaccone, Allan Knies, Maziar Manesh, Sylvia Ratnasamy
• Keywords: Feature Router Workloads, Operating System, Parallel Router Prototype, Software Router Architecture, SOSP 2009