Ribosome Experiments

Ribosome is a system that extends programmable switches with external memory (to store packets) and external general-purpose packet processing devices such as CPUs or FPGAs (to perform stateful operations). It leverages spare bandwidth from any directly connected servers to store the incoming payloads through RDMA.

This repository contains multiple experiments implemented by FastClick and NPF to measure the benefits of Ribosome on the performance of Network Functions (NFs).

Please check out our paper at NSDI '23 for more information.

Download

git clone --recursive https://github.com/Ribosome-Packet-Processor/Ribosome-experiments.git

Repository Organization

This repository contains information, experiment setups, and some of the results presented in our NSDI'23 paper. More specifically:

Testbed

NOTE: Before running the experiments, you need to prepare your testbed according to the following guidelines.

All the experiments mainly require Fastclick and NPF tools!

Network Performance Framework (NPF) Tool

You can install NPF via the following command:

python3 -m pip install --user npf

Do not forget to add export PATH=$PATH:~/.local/bin to ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc. Otherwise, you cannot run npf-compare and npf-run commands.

NPF will look for cluster/ and repo/ in your current working/testie directory. We have included the required repo for our experiments and a sample cluster template, available at experiment/. For more information about how to setup your cluster please check the NPF guidelines.

NPF automatically clone and build FastClick for the experiments based on the testie/npf files.

Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK)

We use DPDK to bypass kernel network stack in order to achieve line rate in our tests. To build DPDK, you can run the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/DPDK/dpdk.git
cd dpdk
git checkout v20.02
make install T=x86_64-native-linux-gcc

In case you want to use a newer (or different) version of DPDK, please check DPDK documentation.

After building DPDK, you have to define RTE_SDK and RTE_TARGET by running the following commands:

export RTE_SDK=<your DPDK root directory>
export RTE_TARGET=x86_64-native-linux-gcc

Also, do not forget to setup hugepages. To do so, you can modify GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX variable in /etc/default/grub file similar to the following configuration:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="isolcpus=0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 iommu=pt intel_iommu=on default_hugepagesz=1G hugepagesz=1G hugepages=32 acpi=on selinux=0 audit=0 nosoftlockup processor.max_cstate=1 intel_idle.max_cstate=0 intel_pstate=on nopti nospec_store_bypass_disable nospectre_v2 nospectre_v1 nospec l1tf=off netcfg/do_not_use_netplan=true mitigations=off"