DPDK and energy efficiency

Mon Feb 22 21:16:38 UTC 2021

Beyond RX/TX CPU affinity, in DANOS you can further tune power consumption by changing the adaptive polling rate.  It doesn’t, per the survey, "keep utilization at 100% regardless of packet activity.”  Adaptive polling changes in DPDK optimize for tradeoffs between power consumption, latency/jitter and drops during throughput ramp up periods.  Ideally your DPDK implementation has an algorithm that tries to automatically optimize based on current traffic patterns.

In DANOS refer to the “system default dataplane power-profile” config command tree for adaptive polling settings.  Interface RX/TX affinity is configured on a per interface basis under the “interfaces dataplane” config command tree.

-robert

> On Feb 22, 2021, at 11:46 AM, Jared Geiger <jared at compuwizz.net> wrote:
> 
> DANOS lets you specify how many dataplane cores you use versus control plane cores. So if you put a 16 core host in to handle 2GB of traffic, you can adjust the dataplane worker cores as needed. Control plane cores don't stay at 100% utilization. 
> 
> I use that technique plus DANOS runs on VMware (not oversubscribed) which allows me to use the hardware for other VMs. NICS are attached to the VM via PCI Passthrough which helps eliminate the overhead to the VMware hypervisor itself.
> 
> I have an 8 core VM with 4 cores set to dataplane and 4 to control plane. The 4 control plane cores are typically idle only processing BGP route updates, SNMP, logs, etc.
> 
> ~Jared
> 
> On Sun, Feb 21, 2021 at 11:30 PM Etienne-Victor Depasquale <edepa at ieee.org> wrote:
> Hello folks,
> 
> I've just followed a thread regarding use of CGNAT and noted a suggestion (regarding DANOS) that includes use of DPDK.
> 
> As I'm interested in the breadth of adoption of DPDK, and as I'm a researcher into energy and power efficiency, I'd love to hear your feedback on your use of power consumption control by DPDK.
> 
> I've drawn up a bare-bones, 2-question survey at this link: 
> 
> https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/J886DPY. 
> 
> Responses have been set to anonymous.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Etienne
> 
> -- 
> Ing. Etienne-Victor Depasquale
> Assistant Lecturer
> Department of Communications & Computer Engineering
> Faculty of Information & Communication Technology
> University of Malta
> Web. https://www.um.edu.mt/profile/etiennedepasquale