zeng2019/homa

Low-Latency Data Center Network Transport

Homa

An implementation of the Homa transport protocol as a C++ userspace library.

What is the Homa transport protocol?

Homa is a new transport protocol for datacenter networks developed at the Stanford PlatformLab. Homa provides exceptionally low latency, especially for workloads with a high volume of very short messages, and it also supports large messages and high network utilization. A complete description of Homa can be found in this paper. A version of this was published in ACM SIGCOMM 2018.

What is this implementation?

This project aims to provide a implementation of the Homa transport protocol that can be included by applications as a C++ library and can run completely in userspace, bypassing the kernel for the best possible performance.

The implementation built in two layers:

1. a "Packet Driver" which provides simple unreliable packet send/receive, and
2. the Transport which implements the Homa protocol using packet send/receive.

This project provides a DPDK based implementation of a Driver which allows high performance packet processing for linux-based systems with a range of NICs. The Transport is Driver agnostic so other environments can be supported by building additional drivers.

What is the current state of this implementation?

This implementation is under active development but is currently incomplete.

Quick Start

Dependencies

Required:

• CMake (>= 3.11)
• DPDK (17.11)

Optional:

• Doxygen
• pthreads

Download

git clone https://github.com/PlatformLab/Homa.git

Build

From the Homa project directory:

cmake -E make_directory build
cmake -E chdir build
cmake --build build

Install (default install prefix)

sudo cmake --build build --target install