SLOMO

Material for SLOMO performance prediction framework presented at SIGCOMM 2020

Hardware & OS

We use two machines for our experiments, one for hosting NFs and another for traffic generation. Below we describe two such hardware setups.

Setup 1

• CPU: Intel Xeon E5-2620 v4

• NIC: Intel XL710 - 40GbE QSFP+ 1584 (2 NICs/server)

• OS: Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS - 4.15.0-99-generic

• DPDK: 18.05.1 stable

• NIC Drivers: i40e-2.9.21 - iavf-3.7.53

Setup 2

• CPU: Intel Xeon Silver 4110

• NIC: Mellanox MT27700 Family [ConnectX-4] 1013 (2 NICs/server)

• OS: Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS - 4.15.0-48-generic

• DPDK: 18.11.1 stable

• NIC Drivers: MLNX_OFED_LINUX-4.5-1.0.1.0-ubuntu18.04-x86_64

Note:

• Each port on the generator is directly attached to the corresponding physical port of the testing server.
• Ideally, both machines should be dual-socket with high core count processors. Hyper-threading should be deactivated.
• The specific driver NICs were necessary to ensure that DPDK would work seamlessly on top of SR-IOV.

Installation - Setup

• setup/ contains sample setup commands for partitioning the NIC with SRIOV.

• experiment_scripts/ contains sample scripts that initiate NF experiments

• data_processing/ contains sample routines for parsing experiment data

• traffic_generator/ contains a sample traffic generation script

• The NFs we used in our work rely on DPDK for I/O.

• Please ensure that your NIC’s VF drivers are updated and that a compatible version of DPDK is being used.

• Please ensure that NFs will be spawned on cores of the same CPU socket as the NIC they will be receiving traffic from to avoid unnecessary communication over QPI.