OFLOPS-Turbo: Testing the next-generation OpenFlow switch

The heterogeneity barrier breakthrough achieved by the OpenFlow protocol is currently paced by the variability in performance semantics among network devices, which reduces the ability of applications to take complete advantage of programmable control. As a result, control applications remain conservative on performance requirements in order to be generalizable and trade performance for explicit state consistency in order to support varying performance behaviours. In this paper we argue that network control must be optimized towards network device capabilities and network managers and application developers must perform informed design decision using accurate switch performance profiles. This becomes highly critical for modern OpenFlow-enabled 10 GbE optical switches which significantly elevate switch performance requirements. We present OFLOPS-Turbo, the integration of the OFLOPS switch evaluation platform, with the OSNT platform, a hardware-accelerated traffic generation and capture system supporting lossless 10 GbE functionality. Using OFLOPS-Turbo, we conduct an evaluation of flow table manipulation capabilities in a representative collection of 10 GbE production OpenFlow switch devices and interpret the evolution of OpenFlow support by comparison with historical data.This work was jointly supported by the EPSRC INTERNET Project EP/H040536/1 and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), under contract FA8750-11- C-0249. The views, opinions, and/or findings contained in this article/presentation are those of the author/ presenter and should not be interpreted as representing the official views or policies, either expressed or implied, of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or the Department of Defense.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from IEEE via http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICC.2015.724921

Enabling Performance Evaluation beyond 10 Gbps

Despite network monitoring and testing being critical for computer networks, current solutions are both extremely expensive and inflexible. This demo presents OSNT (www.osnt.org), a community-driven, high-performance, open-source traffic generator and capture system built on top of the NetFPGA-10G board which enables flexible network testing. The platform supports full line-rate traffic generation regardless of packet size across the four card ports, packet capture filtering and packet thinning in hardware and sub-msec time precision in traffic generation and capture, corrected using an external GPS device. Furthermore, it provides a software APIs to test the dataplane performance of multi-10G switches, providing a starting point for a number of different test cases. OSNT flexibility is further demonstrated through the OFLOPS-turbo platform: an integration of OSNT with the OFLOPS OpenFlow switch performance evaluation platform, enabling control and data plane evaluation of 10G switches. This demo showcases the applicability of the OSNT platform to evaluate the performance of legacy and OpenFlow-enabled networking devices, and demonstrates it using commercial switches

Towards a highly scalable network tester

High end networked-systems have quickly climbed from a throughput of gigabits/sec to terabits/sec, and are approaching petabits/sec. Alas, network testing equipment has not scaled: it remained either low throughput or extremely expensive. With suitable network testing equipment either not at scale or too expensive even for commercial vendors, systems may be released without proper testing and validation. We propose a methodology for large scale testing of networked systems, based on using a low-cost open source network tester and a commodity switch. Our approach is scalable, open source, and accurate, and can be adapted to a variety of networking equipment, widely available to users.1. Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship ECF-2016-289, 2. (EPSRC) EARL: sdn EnAbled MeasuRement for alL project (Project Reference EP/P025374/1)

An open testing framework for next-generation openflow switches

The deployment experience of OpenFlow support in production networks has highlighted variable limitations between network devices and vendors, while the recent integration of OpenFlow control abstractions in 10 GbE switches, increases further the performance requirements to support the switch control plane. This paper presents OFLOPS-Turbo, an effort to integrate OFLOPS, the OpenFlow switch evaluation platform, with OSNT, a hardware-accelerated traffic generation and capture system

NetFPGA: status, uses, developments, challenges, and evaluation

The constant growth of the Internet, driven by the demand for timely access to data center networks; has meant that the technological platforms necessary to achieve this purpose are outside the current budgets. In this order to make and validate relevant, timely and relevant contributions; it is necessary that a wider community, access to evaluation, experimentation and demonstration environments with specifications that can be compared with existing networking solutions. This article introduces the NetFPGA, which is a platform to develop network hardware for reconfigurable and rapid prototyping. It’s introduces the application areas in high-performance networks, advantages for traffic analysis, packet flow, hardware acceleration, power consumption and parallel processing in real time. Likewise, it presents the advantages of the platform for research, education, innovation, and future trends of this platform. Finally, we present a performance evaluation of the tool called OSNT (Open-Source Network Tester) and shows that OSNT has 95% accuracy of timestamp with resolution of 10ns for the generation of TCP traffic, and 90% efficiency capturing packets at 10Gbps of full line-rate

The utility of hypercoordination and secondary bonding for the synthesis of a binary organoelement oxo cluster

A strategy for the preparation of the otherwise difficult to obtain binary organometallic oxides containing two heavy main group elements is described and exemplified by the synthesis of [(p-MeOC6H4)2Te(OSnt-Bu2OH)2]2.<br /

Design and Implementation of a High Performance Network Processor with Dynamic Workload Management

Internet plays a crucial part in today\u27s world. Be it personal communication, business transactions or social networking, internet is used everywhere and hence the speed of the communication infrastructure plays an important role. As the number of users increase the network usage increases i.e., the network data rates ramped up from a few Mb/s to Gb/s in less than a decade. Hence the network infrastructure needed a major upgrade to be able to support such high data rates. Technological advancements have enabled the communication links like optical fibres to support these high bandwidths, but the processing speed at the nodes remained constant. This created a need for specialised devices for packet processing in order to match the increasing line rates which led to emergence of network processors. Network processors were both programmable and flexible. To support the growing number of internet applications, a single core network processor has transformed into a multi/many core network processor with multiple cores on a single chip rather than just one core. This improved the packet processing speeds and hence the performance of a network node. Multi-core network processors catered to the needs of a high bandwidth networks by exploiting the inherent packet-level parallelism in a network. But these processors still had intrinsic challenges like load balancing. In order to maximise throughput of these multi-core network processors, it is important to distribute the traffic evenly across all the cores. This thesis describes a multi-core network processor with dynamic workload management. A multi-core network processor, which performs multiple applications is designed to act as a test bed for an effective workload management algorithm. An effective workload management algorithm is designed in order to distribute the workload evenly across all the available cores and hence maximise the performance of the network processor. Runtime statistics of all the cores were collected and updated at run time to aid in deciding the application to be performed on a core to to enable even distribution of workload among the cores. Hence, when an overloading of a core is detected, the applications to be performed on the cores are re-assigned. For testing purposes, we built a flexible and a reusable platform on NetFPGA 10G board which uses a FPGA-based approach to prototyping network devices. The performance of the designed workload management algorithm is tested by measuring the throughput of the system for varying workloads

Baumann Skin Type in the Korean Male Population

Background: Research into the Baumann skin type (BST) has recently expanded, with growing interest in the development of an efficient and effective skin type classification system for better understanding of this skin condition. Objective: We aimed to identify male-specific skin type characteristics with investigation into the distribution of BST by age and region in the Korean male population and to determine the intrinsic and extrinsic factors related to skin type. Methods: A questionnaire was administered to collect information about age, region, working behavior, drinking behavior, smoking behavior, usual habit of sun protection, medical history, and the BST which consisted of four parameters; oily (O) or dry (D), sensitive (S) or resistant (R), pigmented (P) or non-pigmented (N), and wrinkled (W) or tight (T). Results: We surveyed 1,000 Korean males aged between 20 and 60 years who were divided equally by age and region. Of the total respondents, OSNW type accounted for the largest percentage and ORPW type the lowest. In terms of Baumann parameters, O type was 53.5%, S type was 56.1%, N type was 84.4% and W type was 57.5%. Several behavioral factors were found to have various relationships with the skin type. Conclusion: The predominant skin type in the Korean male respondents was OSNW type, and the distribution of skin types with regards to age and region was reported to be distinct. Therefore, skin care should be customized based on detailed skin types considering the various environmental factors.ope