P4GPU: Accelerate packet processing of a P4 program with a CPU-GPU heterogeneous architecture

The P4 language is an emerging domain-specific language for describing the data plane processing at a network device. P4 has been mapped to a wide range of forwarding devices including NPUs, programmable NICs and FPGAs, except for General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit (GPGPU) which is a salient parallel architecture for processing network flows. In this work, we design a heterogeneous architecture with both CPU and GPU as a P4 programming target, and present a toolset to map a P4 program onto the proposed architecture. Our evaluation reveals that a P4 program can render promising performance on such architecture by parallelizing its “match+action” engine with the GPGPU accelerator. The experiment results show that the auto-configured GPU kernels achieve scalable lookup and classification speeds: the prototype system can reach up to 580 Gbps for IP lookups (64-byte packets) and 60 million classifications per second for 4k firewall rules, respectively.