GPUNFV: a GPU-Accelerated NFV System

This paper presents GPUNFV, a high-performance NFV system providing flow-level micro services for stateful service chains with Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) acceleration. GPUNFV exploits the massively-parallel processing power of GPU to maximize the throughput of the NFV system. Combined with the customized flow handler, GPUNFV achieves a much better throughput than the existing NFV systems. With a carefully designed GPU-based virtualized network function framework, GPUNFV is able to efficiently support both stateful and stateless network functions. We have implemented a number of GPU-based network functions and a preliminary GPUNFV system to demonstrate the lexibility and potential of our design.