Dynamic Core Allocation and Packet Scheduling in Multicore Network Processors

摘要

With ever increasing network traffic rates, multicore architectures for network processors have successfully provided performance improvements through high parallelism. However, naively allocating the network traffic to multiple cores without considering diversified applications and flow locality results in issues such as packet reordering, load imbalance and inefficient cache usage. Consequently, these issues degrade the performance of latency sensitive network processors by dropping packets or delivering packets out of order. In this paper, we propose a packet scheduling scheme that considers the multiple dimensions of locality to improve the throughput of a network processor while minimizing out of order packets. Our scheduling policy tries to maintain packet order my maintaining the flow locality, minimizes the migration of flows from one core to another by identifying the aggressive flows, and partitions the cores among multiple services to gain instruction cache locality. Our light weight hardware implementation shows improvement of 60 percent in the number of packets dropped and 80 percent in the number of out-of-order packet deliveries over previously proposed techniques.