Can networking applications achieve suitable performance with IOMMU at high rates? Our recent PeerJ CS article answers this question by characterizing the performance implications of IOMMU and its cache (IOTLB) on recent Intel Xeon Scalable & AMD EPYC processors at 200 Gbps. Our study shows that enabling IOMMU at high rates could result in an up-to-20-percent throughput drop due to excessive IOTLB misses. Moreover, we present potential mitigation techniques to recover the introduced throughput drop caused by the “IOTLB wall” by using hugepage-backed buffers in the Linux kernel. This is joint work with Alireza Farshin (KTH), Luigi Rizzo (Google), Khaled Elmeleegy (Google), and Dejan Kostic (KTH). Follow the links for PDF and code.”

On April 1, 2023 Professor Maguire became Professor emeritus connected to KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and on April 21 there was a ceremony in Stockholm to mark this event. Congratulations to Professor Maguire on a fantastic career that is nowhere near to being over!

We are very happy to announce that Alireza Farshin successfully defended his PhD thesis on March 6, 2023! Prof. Gerald Q. Maguire Jr. was  a superb co-advisor (as always!), and Prof. Mark Silberstein was a stellar opponent at the defense seminar. Alireza’s thesis is available online:

Realizing Low-Latency Packet Processing on Multi-Hundred-Gigabit-Per-Second Commodity Hardware: Exploit Caching to Improve Performance

This was a hybrid defense, so here is the Zoom screenshot plus an on-site image:

We are hugely honored that our “Packet Order Matters!” paper received the Community Award at NSDI 2022! More details are available in our earlier post.

Presentation video is below:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0M8EiLYgYpA]