The Fast Data Project announces significant performance gains reaching terabit levels at multi-million route scale.

July 11, 2017

2 Min Read

SAN FRANCISCO – July 11, 2017– The Fast Data Project of FD.io (“Fido”), which focuses on data IO speed and efficiency supporting the creation of high performance, flexible, and scalable software-defined infrastructures, today announced significant performance gains reaching terabit levels at multi-million route scale.

Architectural improvement increases in latest Intel Xeon Scalable processor family – such as increased PCIe bandwidth – allow FD.io to double its performance at scale without modification to the software. Building on its recent 17.04 release, FD.io is the only vSwitch for which performance scaling is IO bound rather than CPU bound.

FD.io offers the software-defined infrastructure developer community a landing site with multiple projects fostering innovations in software-based packet processing towards the creation of high-throughput, low-latency, and resource-efficient IO services suitable to many architectures (x86, ARM, and PowerPC) and deployment environments (bare metal, VM, container).

"FD.io has long been able to deliver complex routing/switching at multi-million fib entry scale at the limit of the rate the PCI bus can deliver packets to the CPU,” said David Ward, FD.io Board Chair and SVP, CTO and chief architect of engineering, Cisco. “The increase in PCI bandwidth per socket in Intel’s latest product offering has doubled our performance to 1 Tbit/s with our existing unmodified 17.04 release, once again pegging the limit of what the PCI bus can handle. We look forward to being able to make similar gains as PCI bandwidth per socket continues to grow.”

Vector Packet Processing (VPP), a key project component of FD.io, designed with server-class optimization such as vector instruction, cache optimizations, and packet pre-fetching achieves world-class performance when connected to IO devices via the DPDK plug-in. The VPP framework gives developers the potential to easily build any number of packet processing solutions by varying the underlying forwarding graphs while also easily accommodating new graph nodes to be “plugged in.”

FD.io recently issued its fourth release, FD.io 17.04, which contains a set of new features to enable commercial-ready solutions for software-defined infrastructures, and will be issuing its next release, FD.io 17.07, this fall. FD.io has made significant strides since its launch in February 2016; it now leverages contributions from more than 173 contributors from over 45 different organizations including network operators, service providers, chip vendors, and integrators who are collaborating to enhance and innovate around the Vector Packet Processing (VPP) technology.

The Fast Data Project (FD.io) “Fido” is a collaborative open source project of the Linux Foundation that aims to establish a high-performance IO services framework for dynamic computing environments. The FD.io Community includes Network IO, Packet Processing, and Dataplane Management Agents fostering innovations in software based packet processing towards the creation of high-throughput, low-latency and resource-efficient IO services suitable to many architectures (x86, ARM, and PowerPC) and deployment environments (bare metal, VM, container).

Fast Data Project (FD.io)

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