All are invited to a seminar on Wednesday, March 26, 2025, at 11:25 a.m.–12:40 p.m. in Michael Paul Galvin Tower, room 1F6-1. Nishanth Shyamkumar, research software engineer at Illinois Tech’s Department of Computer Science, will give a talk titled “DPDK: Achieving High Performance Networking on a CPU.” His current areas of research are in distributed systems, high performance networking and programmable networking.

Abstract

With network port speeds increasing all the time, and the need to process more data everpresent, the idea of high speed network processing has become important. Running this processing on a general purpose CPUs improves flexibility and reduces cost. In this talk, we will discuss how the normal Linux network stack is limited in its’ ability to process packets at a high throughput of 10Gb/s and above. We will go over the inherent limitations of a CPU and then introduce DPDK; a framework for high performance networking on a CPU. How does memory access, CPU scheduler, PCIe and other system components affect and determine network performance? What does DPDK do inorder to overcome these bottlenecks? As an example, we will show a DPDK program running on the FABRIC research testbed, that does basic L2 forwarding, and we also will explain the main code sections. Finally, we show a widely used packet generation tool written in DPDK, called DPDK-Pktgen and explain in brief how it can be used in experiments.