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PacketShader – GPU-Accelerated Software Router (2011) (shader.kaist.edu)
26 points by todsac 2245 days ago
4 comments

Nowadays GPUs are a poor choice for this. GPUs have fairly high latency and are designed to be optimal for embarrassingly parallel computations. Sure you can do 10gigabits/sec but because you're batching that'll result in your latency being high-ish on average.

In terms of non-CPU hardware for routing FPGA's are still king if you need a bit of flexibility. In theory a rule table can be defined in configs and then flashed onto the FGPA for line-speed packet processing. Even then, given how slow FPGA's are to flash CPUs are still king when general packet processing is needed.

This is 10 years old! The GPU the benchmarks run on has 480 cores, and modern GPUs have >5000, and the available memory has gone from 1.5GB to 32GB.

I'd love to see these numbers run with a modern GPU.

Interesting... looks like it's effective for routing minimum-sized packets. As an aside, this is the epitome of good web design. Fast, clear, proper line-widths... I'm in love :)