OVS – Acceleration platform for virtual switches

Acceleration platform for virtual switches
Acronym: OVS

Provider: TA ČR

Program: The EPSILON programme for the support of applied research and experimental development (2015 - 2025)
Identification number: TH04010193

Implementation period: 01/2019–12/2021

Coordinator: Netcope Technologies, a.s.
Number of participants in the project: 2
Role of CESNET: partner
Project manager for CESNET: Ing. Tomáš Martínek, Ph.D.

The proposed project responds to the requirements of data centers to switch traffic between virtual machines and physical interfaces quickly and effectively. Existing solutions implemented in software lack the throughput and have a huge overhead, where the number of CPU cores is consumed for packet switching instead of providing paid services in the form of virtual machines. Solutions based on hardware acceleration eliminate these problems and allow to decrease both operating expense and capital expenditure.

This project is focused on the development of an acceleration platform for virtual Open vSwitch, which is one of the most used solutions in the area of data centers. The platform is based on the PCIe acceleration card equipped with two 100G Ethernet network interfaces and programmable FPGA chip, that will implement the major virtual switch functionality, i.e. packet reception, classification, and transmission into the appropriate virtual machine or physical network interface. The key feature of the platform is the possibility to configure switch architecture (a type of the packet classification, number of match/action tables and their size), that allows the user to adapt the platform to his/her requirements and achieve high throughput at the same time.

Last change: 22.5.2019