RE: Route optimization using GPUs?

[Drew Weaver <drew.weaver () thenap com>]

Sure, alright but given what you just said doesn’t it seem odd that there is still a static BGP tiebreaker in 2024?

From: Tom Beecher <beecher () beecher cc>
Sent: Thursday, December 5, 2024 12:12 PM
To: Jason Bothe <jbothe () me com>
Cc: Drew Weaver <drew.weaver () thenap com>; nanog () nanog org
Subject: Re: Route optimization using GPUs?

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<mailto: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<mailto: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