Run-Time System for Scalable Network Services

Sophisticated middlebox services-such as network monitor - ing and intrusion detection, DDoS mitigation, worm scan- ning, XML parsing and protocol transformation-are becomin g increasingly popular in today's Internet. To support high- throughput, these services are often deployed on Distribut ed Memory, Multi-processor (DM-MP) hardware platforms such as a cluster of network processors. Scaling the throughput of such platforms, however, is challenging because of the difficulties and overheads of accessing persistent, sharedstate maintained by the services. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of Oboe, a run-time system for DM-MP platforms that addresses the above challenge through two foundations: (1) category- specific management of shared state, and (2) adaptive flow- level load distribution for addressing persistent process or overload. Our simulations demonstrate thatOboe can achieve performance within 0-5% of an ideal adaptive system. Our prototype implementation of Oboe on a cluster of IXP2400 network processors, demonstrates the scalability achieve d with increasing number of processors, number of flows and state size.