Run-Time System for Scalable Network Services

Sophisticated middlebox services–such as network monitoring and intrusion detection, DDoS mitigation, worm scanning, XML parsing and protocol transformation–are becoming increasingly popular in today’s Internet. To support highthroughput, these services are often deployed on Distributed Memory, Multi-processor (DM-MP) hardware platforms such as a cluster of network processors. Scaling the throughput of such platforms, however, is challenging because of the difficulties and overheads of accessing persistent, shared state maintained by the services. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of Oboe, a run-time system for DM-MP platforms that addresses the above challenge through two foundations: (1) categoryspecific management of shared state, and (2) adaptive flowlevel load distribution for addressing persistent processor overload. Our simulations demonstrate that Oboe can achieve performance within 0-5% of an ideal adaptive system. Our prototype implementation ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Upendra Shevade, Ravi Kokku, Harrick M. Vin
• Keywords: Communications, INFOCOM 2008, Network Processors, Persistent Processor Overload, Sophisticated Middlebox Services–such