PhD Seminar • Systems and Networking — RocketBufs: A Framework for Efficient Data Dissemination and Delivery

Friday, February 8, 2019 1:30 pm - 1:30 pm EST (GMT -05:00)

Ben Cassell, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Many modern systems rely on the high-speed distribution of content to vast numbers of consumers. For highly popular content the data is often disseminated (replicated) to multiple servers in data centers (or IXPs) for scalable, encrypted delivery to nearby consumers. Examples of such systems include live video streaming, publish-subscribe (pub/sub), message queuing and stream processing.

In this talk we outline our design of RocketBufs, a framework designed to facilitate the construction of high performance content dissemination and delivery systems. A key component of RocketBufs is support for CPU efficient Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) for disseminating data to nodes within a data center. As an illustration of the potential benefits of this approach, we modify a web server to use our RocketBufs framework. Preliminary results show that when using the RDMA component of RocketBufs to stream live video, the web server can support up to 60% more clients than when using TCP.