[Nets-seminars] SIGCOMM practice talk: Ilias Marinos, Wed., 6 Aug, 3 PM

[Brad Karp]

Greetings, everyone.

Ilias Marinos, who did his MSc on the NCS program at UCL, and is now a PhD student at Cambridge, will be presenting his work on customized high-performance user-level network protocol stacks. (This is joint work with Robert Watson, Ilias's supervisor at Cambridge, and Mark Handley.)

Please attend and help give Ilias constructive feedback on his talk before SIGCOMM!

Talk announcement follows.

See you there,
-Brad, bkarp at cs.ucl.ac.uk

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Speaker: Ilias Marinos, University of Cambridge
Time: 6th August, 3 PM
Location: Foster Court 112

Title: Network Stack Specialization for Performance

Abstract:

Contemporary network stacks are masterpieces of generality, sup-
porting many edge-node and middle-node functions. Generality comes at
a high performance cost: current APIs, memory models, and
implementations drastically limit the effectiveness of increasingly
powerful hardware. Generality has historically been required so that
individual systems could perform many functions. However, as
providers have scaled services to support millions of users, they have
transitioned toward thousands (or millions) of dedicated servers, each
performing a few functions. We argue that the overhead of generality
is now a key obstacle to effective scaling, making specialization not
only viable, but necessary.

We present Sandstorm and Namestorm, web and DNS servers that utilize a
clean-slate userspace network stack that exploits knowledge of
application-specific workloads. Based on the netmap framework, our
novel approach merges application and network-stack memory models,
aggressively amortizes protocol-layer costs based on application-layer
knowledge, couples tightly with the NIC event model, and exploits
microarchitectural features. Simultaneously, the servers retain use of
conventional programming frameworks. We compare our approach with the
FreeBSD and Linux stacks using the nginx web server and NSD name
server, demonstrating 2–10× and 9× improvements in web-server and DNS
throughput, lower CPU usage, linear multicore scaling, and saturated
NIC hardware.

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