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GEN: A GPU-Accelerated Elastic Framework for NFV

Published: 01 August 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has the potential to enhance service delivery flexibility and reduce overall costs by provisioning software-based service function chains (SFCs) on commodity hardware. However, we observe that existing CPU-based SFC solutions cannot achieve both high performance and high elasticity simultaneously. To address such a critical challenge, we seek beyond CPU and exploit the capability of Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) to support NFV. We propose GEN, a GPU-based high performance and elastic framework for NFV. As opposed to pipeline-based SFCs in existing GPU-based NFV systems, GEN proposes to support RTC-based SFCs to improve processing performance. Meanwhile, GEN offers great elasticity of network function (NF) scaling up and down by allocating a different number of fine-grained GPU threads to an NF during runtime. We have implemented a prototype of GEN. Preliminary evaluation results demonstrate that GEN improves performance with RTC-based SFCs, and supports adaptive, precise, and fast NF scaling for NFV.

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Cited By

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  • (2023)On Efficient Packet Batching and Resource Allocation for GPU based NFV Acceleration2023 IEEE/ACM 31st International Symposium on Quality of Service (IWQoS)10.1109/IWQoS57198.2023.10188696(1-10)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2023
  • (2022)Simmer: Rate proportional scheduling to reduce packet drops in vGPU based NF chainsProceedings of the 51st International Conference on Parallel Processing10.1145/3545008.3545068(1-11)Online publication date: 29-Aug-2022
  • (2022)Unleashing GPUs for Network Function Virtualization: an open architecture based on Vulkan and KubernetesNOMS 2022-2022 IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium10.1109/NOMS54207.2022.9789822(1-8)Online publication date: 25-Apr-2022
  • Show More Cited By

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cover image ACM Other conferences
APNet '18: Proceedings of the 2nd Asia-Pacific Workshop on Networking
August 2018
78 pages
ISBN:9781450363952
DOI:10.1145/3232565
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 01 August 2018

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Author Tags

  1. GPU
  2. NFV
  3. Plerformance
  4. Service chain

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  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed limited

Funding Sources

  • National Science Foundation of China
  • National Key R&D Program of China

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APNet '18

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Overall Acceptance Rate 50 of 118 submissions, 42%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2023)On Efficient Packet Batching and Resource Allocation for GPU based NFV Acceleration2023 IEEE/ACM 31st International Symposium on Quality of Service (IWQoS)10.1109/IWQoS57198.2023.10188696(1-10)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2023
  • (2022)Simmer: Rate proportional scheduling to reduce packet drops in vGPU based NF chainsProceedings of the 51st International Conference on Parallel Processing10.1145/3545008.3545068(1-11)Online publication date: 29-Aug-2022
  • (2022)Unleashing GPUs for Network Function Virtualization: an open architecture based on Vulkan and KubernetesNOMS 2022-2022 IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium10.1109/NOMS54207.2022.9789822(1-8)Online publication date: 25-Apr-2022
  • (2022)Virtualizing GPU direct packet I/O on commodity Ethernet to accelerate GPU-NFVJournal of Network and Computer Applications10.1016/j.jnca.2022.103480206(103480)Online publication date: Oct-2022
  • (2021)NFV Platforms: Taxonomy, Design Choices and Future ChallengesIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2020.304538118:1(30-48)Online publication date: Mar-2021
  • (2020)Affinity-Aware VNF Placement in Mobile Edge Clouds via Leveraging GPUsIEEE Transactions on Computers10.1109/TC.2020.3041629(1-1)Online publication date: 2020
  • (2019)Reducing Latency in Virtual Machines: Enabling Tactile Internet for Human-Machine Co-WorkingIEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications10.1109/JSAC.2019.290678837:5(1098-1116)Online publication date: May-2019

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