Fast forwarding table lookup exploiting GPU memory architecture

Abstract

As the traffic of the Internet increases and diversifies, the needs for a fast flexible router have made researchers to work on software routers. The existing software router systems may utilize the cluster structure of multiple machines or GPU systems. Especially, Packet Shader, which uses GPU to exploit GPU's extensive parallelism, shows higher performance compared to other existing software routers. However, Packet Shader does not utilize the memory architecture in the GPU system. Basically, GPU has different types of memories such as constant, texture, and global. Since different types of memories show different memory access performance, we propose a unique index architecture for the forwarding table by exploiting the memory architecture of the GPU system. Through a preliminary evaluation, we show that the forwarding table lookup using GPU can outperform the CPU only system.