Building a 25 Gbit/s workstation for the SCION Association
github.com
github.com
It would have been a lot easier to focus on the important implementation details if the server was an off the shelf Lenovo datacenter server (SD550?) with a pair of 100 gig/s NVIDIA cards in it.
(Source: last month I set up a machine like this for a colleague to do approximately the same task. I spent "copy and paste the production server config" time on it, not a week.)
My main home server is a Supermicro SYS-510D-4C-FN6P. It has dual 25Gbps ports onboard but also an Intel E810-XXVDA4T with another 4x25Gbps ports.
Both of them are perfectly capable of saturating their ports using stock forwarding on Linux, no DPDK, VPP, anything, without breaking a sweat. Both of them were substantially cheaper than the machine in the article.
Is there something I'm missing? Why does this workstation need a ~$1000 motherboard and a ~$1000 Xeon CPU? Those two components alone cost more than either of my computers and seem like severe overkill.
By my guess, a competent and efficient implementation should be able to run the routing logic at ~30-100 million packets per second per core. That would be ~300-1,000 Gb/s per core, so you would bottleneck on your memory bandwidth if you have even a single copy.
[1] https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-dekater-scion-dataplan...
Yes, as stated in the article, it probably could have been cheaper. But this setup is supposed to:
1. Run simulations and benchmarks of/on entire SCION topologies with multiple ASes.
2. Potentially grow beyond 25 Gbit/s into the 200 Gbit/s ranges (and more?).
3. Be available to me ASAP (can't wait months for it to arrive from China).
4. Potentially be used for CI/CD performance regression testing in the future.
The budget allowed a bit of headroom for the future.
Pathway to even greater corporatization and splintering of the internet?
Replacing public RIRs with private organizations, securely routing between each other..
How do I peer with the big corps in a SCION world?
Security and privacy are already addressed by things like transport layer encryption, so SCION doesn't really enable a more secure internet, it enables more (largely corporate) control
SCION also offers more protection against DDoS attacks and other outages thanks to its multi-path routing capabilities and ability to failover quicker than BGP as it builds and stores its path knowledge in advance.
> How do I peer with the big corps in a SCION world?
You do so by joining an ISD (Isolation Domain) and inheriting TRC (Trust Root Configuration).
> so SCION doesn't really enable a more secure internet, it enables more (largely corporate) control
Much critical infrastructure is still reliant on leased lines or MPLS which is expensive and reliant on a single ISP which often reduces resilience. It often also requires assurances about where its traffic is being forwarded (e.g. through particular countries or regions) which is difficult or impossible with BGP. SCION can instead provide these assurances over the commodity Internet provided by multiple ISPs, by being able to verify paths and allowing packet senders to control how packets should be routed given the available path options.
ISDs are typically for specific use cases (e.g. Swiss Secure Finance Network) where strong assurances are needed for where traffic is sent, but ISDs can decide admission criteria for themselves and how they wish to communicate with other ISDs and the rest of the Internet.
Think of the power grid for example. Putting power plants on the internet is probably a bad idea. A better idea is to interconnect power plants through multiple ISPs over a SCION ISD. Less expensive than leased lines or MPLS, and more flexible.
Noctua no longer manufactures them, they are now made by YS Tech.