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Sue Moon

SmartPortBox: Turning a rack of computers to a router

Abstract

Networking platforms have been mostly dedicated hardware with proprietary software stacks. As the number of networking applications such as QoS controllers, VPNs, WAN optimizers, and firewalls, increases, demand for flexible network configuration is high and software routers are emerging as a practical contender.

In this talk we cover past history of software routers with a focus on projects in our Advanced Networking Lab, namely PacketShader and NBA. Then we present ongoing work on speed-up from Xeon Phi and RDMA interconnect, and lay out future plans to build SmartPortBox. SmartPortBox targets at delivering tera-bits-per-second with a commodity L2 switch and a rack of PCs at an order of magnitude smaller price than a router with the same performance. We conclude with remaining technical challenges and emerging relevant trends.

Sue Moon's bio