Towards Power Efficient High Performance Packet I/O

• Published in: IEEE transactions on parallel and distributed systems Vol. 31; no. 4; pp. 981 - 996
• Main Authors: Li, Xuesong, Cheng, Wenxue, Zhang, Tong, Ren, Fengyuan, Yang, Bailong
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.04.2020; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Analytical models; Batch production systems; busy polling; Data centers; DVFS; High performance packet I/O; Idling; Information management; Kernel; latency; Load modeling; pause instruction; power consumption; Power demand; Power management; Power system management; Traffic information
• ISSN: 1045-9219; 1558-2183
• DOI: 10.1109/TPDS.2019.2957746

Recently, high performance packet I/O frameworks continue to flourish for their ability to process packets from high-speed links. To achieve high throughput and low latency, high performance packet I/O frameworks usually employ busy polling. As busy polling will burn all CPU cycles even if there's no packet to process, these frameworks are quite power inefficient. However, exploiting power management techniques such as DVFS and LPI in the frameworks is challenging, because neither the OS nor the frameworks can provide information (e.g., actual CPU utilization, available idle period, or the target frequency) required by these techniques. In this article, we establish a model that can formulate the packet processing flow of high performance packet I/O to help and address the above challenges. From the model, we can deduce the information needed for power management techniques, and gain the insights to balance the power and latency. After suggesting to use pause instruction to reduce CPU power within short idle period, we propose two approaches to conduct power conservation for high performance packet I/O: one with the aid of traffic information and the other without. Experiments with Intel DPDK show that both approaches can achieve significant power reduction with little latency increase.