[Nets-seminars] TOMORROW, 2 PM: talk by Luigi Rizzo, netmap: A Novel Framework for High-Speed Packet I/O

[Brad Karp]

Greetings, everyone.

A reminder that we are privileged to have Luigi Rizzo of the Universita`
di Pisa visiting us tomorrow, Tuesday, the 11th of October. Luigi is a
renowned networking researcher (past SIGCOMM PC co-chair), whose
contributions have spanned multicast, multicast congestion control,
erasure coding, scheduling, high-performance firewalling, and polling
for high-performance packet processing. Not content merely to publish,
he has built several widely used open-source networking systems that
today ship as part of Microsoft Windows, FreeBSD UNIX, and Mac OS X.

Luigi will be giving a talk at 2 PM on his latest (pre-publication!)
work on netmap, which looks likely to reach a new high watermark in
packet processing performance for modern CPU and network interface
architectures. All strongly encouraged to attend!

Talk announcement below.

Best,
-Brad, bkarp at cs.ucl.ac.uk

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             Netmap: A Novel Framework for High-Speed Packet I/O

                               Luigi Rizzo
                           Universita` di Pisa


                         2 PM, 11th October 2011
                                MPEB 6.12

Abstract:

Software packet processing at line rate is problematic both in
userspace and within the kernel, due to the cost of managing in-kernel
metadata, system calls and data copy. We present a novel framework,
called netmap, that solves these challenges by integrating and
extending good ideas from existing proposals, while at the same time
providing a tight integration with existing operating system
mechanisms. netmap takes as little as 70 clock cycles to move one
packet between the wire and userspace processes--10-20 times faster
than existing APIs. As an example, a single core running at 1 GHz can
generate the 14.88Mpps that saturate a 10GigE interface. This
efficiency is an enabling factor for doing high speed packet
processing within the safe and feature-rich user space environment
provided by modern operating systems. In the talk we will present
netmap and its internals, explain why it is efficient yet safe and
easy to use, and report our experience in developing and porting
applications to the new API--a task made easy by the existence of a
pcap compatibility library. Netmap is available on FreeBSD. Work
supported by EU FP7 Project 
CHANGE
.

Bio:

Luigi Rizzo is an associate professor at the Dipartimento di
Ingegneria dell'Informazione of the Universita` di Pisa, Italy. His
recent work has included fast packet processing, packet scheduling,
network emulation, and disk scheduling. In previous years he worked on
multicast, erasure coding, and multicast congestion control. In past
years he has been a visiting researcher at ICSI , Intel Research
Cambridge, and Intel Research Berkeley. He has developed a few popular
pieces of software including the dummynet network emulator, the ipfw
firewall (both part of the Apple OSX operating system), and a fast
erasure code used in reliable multicast schemes. He has also developed
several kernel subsystems which are part of the FreeBSD operating
system.