[Nets-seminars] Talk Friday 13th February 4:00pm GS/302

[Richard G. Clegg]

Next week's talk will be by Adam Greenhalgh from CS -- I hope to see you 
all there.  Full schedule here: 
http://wwws.ee.ucl.ac.uk/research/comminfosys/nsrg/talks
(Note -- time to start suggesting speakers for May and June!  Anyone want 
to nominate themselves?)

Title :

Tales of the Virtual Routers Project : Using Virtualisation to
Consolidate Software Routers onto a Commodity PC System.

Abstract:

In this talk we will explore router visualization using commodity x86
hardware in light of our experiences in the EPSRC-funded Virtual
Routers Project (http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/vrouter). In the project we
have focused on using commodity hardware because it arguably gives the
best balance between programmability, performance and cost. Further,
we believe that it is the user's job to decide what operating system
and network protocols they run on their Virtual Router, and hence we
assume little more than that the system is based on Ethernet; to
satisfy these constraints we settled on using the Xen hypervisor and
the Click Modular Router as the main building blocks.

We will first discuss issues arising from building such a virtual
router platform while aiming to ensure isolation and fairness between
concurrent virtual routers. We show that using commodity x86 hardware
it is possible to run highly experimental and untrusted router systems
along side a production router on the same hardware platform without
sacrificing performance. We investigate the extent to which we can
isolate a virtual router running experimental code from other virtual
routers.

In the second part of the talk we will touch upon the performance
limitations when building software virtual routers on such systems. We
show that the fundamental performance bottleneck is currently the
memory system, and that through careful mapping of tasks to CPU cores,
we can achieve forwarding rates of 7 million minimum-sized packets per
second on mid-range server-class systems. Finally, we will close the
talk by touching upon the project's current direction, namely how to
exploit our single PC system to build a powerful, scalable and
flexible virtual router made up of many systems.

Brief Bio.:

Adam Greenhalgh is a Research Associate at University College London
and has worked on the EPSRC Virtual Routers project since it started
in September 2006. His main interest is in network systems and has
published papers in areas ranging from low power radios and
virtualised routers to large-scale anti-DoS architectures and p2p DNS
solutions.
-- 
Richard G. Clegg,
Dept of Elec. Eng.,
University College London
http://www.richardclegg.org/