ShaRE: A Run-time System for High-performance Virtualized Routers

Опубликовано 6 сентября 2016, 5:31

Over the past decade, new uses and commercialization have pushed the Internet well beyond the expectations of its designers. Yet, the network architecture and services provided by the Internet have changed little. Because of the size and the multi-provider nature of the Internet, introducing novel architectures and services into the Internet is increasingly difficult. Two recent trends in designing networks---overlay networks and high-performance programmable routers---have brought some optimism into addressing this Internet ossification. Overlay networks provide novel services, can be deployed over the existing Internet, and can be incrementally adopted on a per-node, per-network, or per-application basis. Emerging programmable routers provide a high-performance, programmable substrate on which new services can be deployed and run at multi-Gb/s line speeds. Such routers can host many virtual routers, each supporting a different overlay service. In this talk, I will present ShaRE, the first run-time system that provides the key pieces required to simplify the design and deployment of overlay services on high-performance programmable routers. ShaRE introduces two innovations over state-of-the-art. First, ShaRE includes Everest, a novel variable-quantum, non-work-conserving scheduler for dynamically allocating processing resources to services in high-performance routers. Second, ShaRE exploits several characteristics of network services to minimize the overhead of replicating, check-pointing and migrating the services on processing cores in response to workload fluctuations. Through these innovations, ShaRE successfully copes with the unique challenges presented by the packet processing domain---(1) packets should be processed within a small delay, (2) inter-arrival time of packets is significantly smaller than packet processing times, (3) packet arrival rate fluctuates significantly with time, and (4) large number of packets can arrive within the time required to adapt resource allocations. ShaRE enables the creation of commercial-scale overlay hosting facilities (much like today's Web hosting facilities) that will greatly lower the barrier for introducing new network architectures and services into the Internet.