PacketShader is a high-performance software router framework for general packet processing with Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) acceleration. PacketShader exploits the massively-parallel processing power of GPU to address the CPU bottleneck in current software routers. Combined with our high-performance packet I/O engine, PacketShader outperforms existing software routers by more than a factor of four, forwarding 64B IPv4 packets at 39 Gbps on a single commodity PC. PacketShader evaluation included implementation of IPv4 and IPv6 forwarding, OpenFlow switching, and IPsec tunneling to demonstrate the flexibility and performance advantage of it. The evaluation results show that GPU brings significantly higher throughput over the CPU-only implementation, confirming the effectiveness of GPU for computation and memory-intensive operations in packet processing.
The lecture will also provide background regarding GPU – brief history, architecture, cons and pros for accelerating applications using GPU.
If time will permit, we will also discuss SSLShaders, which accelerates SSL encryption/decryption on the GPU.
Lecture's slides in PDF: Part 1, Part 2
Audio recording of the talk (in English): Click here