What is Data Plane Development Kit (or DPDK) and should you be using it with your application? The purpose of this presentation is to offer a quick explanation of DPDK and compare an application using it to one that is not using it. This testing is done using 2 programs called Ping Pong and Uperf respectively. This research was started by the desire to know if DPDK could benefit Ceph Storage. The current version of Ceph is not able to run the current version of DPDK. There was an attempt to develop Ceph to be able to run DPDK. The old code does, in fact, exist, but was ultimately abandoned due to incompatibilities with DPDK and Ceph, which would have resulted in other bottlenecks that would prevent DPDK from being beneficial to Ceph. The issues with the old Ceph architecture have allegedly been resolved in the new version of Ceph that is currently in development, Ceph Crimson, but due to the development nature of Ceph Crimson, little documentation is currently available, making it difficult to configure and test DPDK-enabled Ceph Crimson. For this reason, the project was simplified to include a simple DPDK application vs a simple non-DPDK application or Ping Pong vs Uperf as mentioned above. Ping Pong and Uperf were chosen not just because they run on DPDK and non-DPDK respectively, but also because they are capable of measuring round-trip latency or the time it takes for a packet to go from point A to point B and back to point A. Round-trip latency is needed due to the original goal of proving DPDK benefits on Ceph, a goal that may have been out of reach for this project, but will hopefully be proven by later projects.
