Virtual switches such as OVS perform classification for each packet, a domain where a similar procedure applies to each packet. Typically these functions are written in scalar C code for performance, however SIMD optimizations may provide higher performance. With AVX-512 the SIMD width has increased to 64-bytes, allowing 512-bits to be processed in parallel.
This talk introduces how to apply SIMD programming techniques to a vswitch such as OVS, which uses the concept of a miniflow structure to perform its switching. Specific examples of AVX-512 optimizations in the context of the OVS datapath classifier will be presented.
