Homa
An implementation of the Homa transport protocol as a C++ userspace library.
(Note: this repo is no longer under active development and the implementation is still at a relatively early stage (see below); for a more production-ready version of Homa, check out the Homa Linux kernel module: PlatformLab/HomaModule)
What is the Homa transport protocol?
Homa is a new transport protocol for datacenter networks developed at the Stanford PlatformLab. Homa provides exceptionally low latency, especially for workloads with a high volume of very short messages, and it also supports large messages and high network utilization. A complete description of Homa can be found in this paper. A version of this was published in ACM SIGCOMM 2018.
What is this implementation?
This project aims to provide a implementation of the Homa transport protocol that can be included by applications as a C++ library and can run completely in userspace, bypassing the kernel for the best possible performance.
The implementation built in two layers:
- a "Packet Driver" which provides simple unreliable packet send/receive, and
- the Transport which implements the Homa protocol using packet send/receive.
This project provides a DPDK based implementation of a Driver which allows high performance packet processing for linux-based systems with a range of NICs. The Transport is Driver agnostic so other environments can be supported by building additional drivers.
What is the current state of this implementation?
This implementation should be close to feature complete or at least runnable. The interface, however, is still in flux and thus not stable to develop against. Additionally, more testing needs to be done to ensure the implementation works as expected.
Quick Start
Dependencies
Required:
- CMake (>= 3.11)
- DPDK (18.11)
Optional:
- Doxygen
- pthreads
Download
git clone https://github.com/PlatformLab/Homa.git
Build
From the Homa project directory:
cmake -E make_directory build
cmake -E chdir build cmake ..
cmake --build build
Install (default install prefix)
sudo cmake --build build --target install