Achieving Flexible, Low-Latency and 100Gbps Line-rate Load Balancing over Ethernet on FPGA

Abstract

Load balancing is one of the most important network services in cloud data centers. However, traditional load balancers are gradually overstretched with the explosive growth of big data, whose latency and throughput are far from satisfying the performance requirements. Based on the high parallelism and flexibility of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), this paper presents a load balancing scheme over Ethernet on an FPGA, which enables flexible load balancing strategies and achieves low-latency and high-throughput. Using parallelization and pipeline techniques, we skillfully implement multiple load balancing algorithms and server state monitoring for server clusters in the data center on FPGA. Besides, the FPGA Ethernet engine to significantly accelerate protocol offloading and packet processing is also designed in our system. We evaluate the system performance on a Xilinx Virtex UltraScale+ VCU118 board. The experimental results show that the system latency can achieve as low as 0.7µs, and the peak throughput is 100Gbps line-rate, which is at least 5.7x faster and 2.5x higher respectively than other hardware or software load balancers.