Leveraging SIMD parallelism for accelerating network applications

Abstract

Software packet processing frameworks act as critical components in modern network architecture, as their performance has a vital impact on the quality of the network services. Motivated by the increasing number and capability for advanced vector instructions in recent mainstream CPUs, this paper explores a new parallel processing design and implementation of data structures and algorithms that are frequently used for building network applications. In particular, we propose effective SIMD optimization techniques for the bloom filter and Open vSwitch megaflow cache. Our design reduces memory access latency via careful prefetching and a new design that meets the needs of fast data consuming instructions. Our evaluation shows performance improvements up to 162% in bloom filter and 48% in Open vSwitch compared to their scalar version.