Re: Route optimization using GPUs?

[Tom Beecher <beecher () beecher cc>]

It's not even that.

GPU's are very good at parallelized vector computations. They are very very
good at THAT, but ONLY that. This is no different conceptually than router
ASICs. They are designed to do ONE thing very well,

BGP bestpath selection is a completely different computational process.

On Thu, Dec 5, 2024 at 12:06 PM Jason Bothe via NANOG <nanog () nanog org>
wrote:

> WIth merchant silicon getting faster and stronger everyday, and capacity
> and transit in a freewill, I’m not sure what GPU optimization would buy
> you, not to mention the ROI. The Internet routing table is not showing
> substantial signs of growth and in some cases has experienced a plateau.
> Also, the experience with ‘route optimization tools’ is that while they may
> bring you some priority in your traffic, they are also known for making
> horrible decisions resulting in widespread outages.
>
> J~
>
>
> On Dec 5, 2024, at 8:13 AM, Drew Weaver <drew.weaver () thenap com> wrote:
>
> So back in the.. hell I don’t know like… early 2010s there was a push for
> ‘route optimization’ from products like RouteScience and the Avaya CNA and
> more recently whatever Noction is doing.
>
> The big pain point for this technology at the time was that it could only
> optimize the top N egress routes due to how many probes it could send out
> and how many results it could process.
>
> It seems like now with a modest GPU in a router you could pretty easily
> ‘optimize’ [to the extent that you believe this technology worked] pretty
> much the whole routing table.
>
> We used these tools extensively back then and they actually worked pretty
> well in most cases. The biggest issue we ran into was people complaining
> that we pinged their IP addresses… which now a days seems like a great
> worst problem to have.
>
> Anyway is anyone doing any work on implementing GPUs into the BGP decision
> making process? Seems like a no brainer.
>
> -Drew