[Youden]

I have 25Gbps from Init7 at home. My "router" is a Minisforum MS-01 with a second-hand Mellanox ConnectX-5, running VyOS.

My main home server is a Supermicro SYS-510D-4C-FN6P. It has dual 25Gbps ports onboard but also an Intel E810-XXVDA4T with another 4x25Gbps ports.

Both of them are perfectly capable of saturating their ports using stock forwarding on Linux, no DPDK, VPP, anything, without breaking a sweat. Both of them were substantially cheaper than the machine in the article.

Is there something I'm missing? Why does this workstation need a ~$1000 motherboard and a ~$1000 Xeon CPU? Those two components alone cost more than either of my computers and seem like severe overkill.

[FireBeyond]

My understanding is that the setup needs to allow them to work on packet routing at those speeds, not just send/receive, to simulate SCION.

[Youden]

Ah, so they need to hold giant routing tables in memory and do lookups in them or something like that?

[wmf]

SCION is much slower than normal IP.

[cpach]

Huh?

[romshark]

> Is there something I'm missing? Why does this workstation need a ~$1000 motherboard and a ~$1000 Xeon CPU? Those two components alone cost more than either of my computers and seem like severe overkill.

Yes, as stated in the article, it probably could have been cheaper. But this setup is supposed to:

1. Run simulations and benchmarks of/on entire SCION topologies with multiple ASes.

2. Potentially grow beyond 25 Gbit/s into the 200 Gbit/s ranges (and more?).

3. Be available to me ASAP (can't wait months for it to arrive from China).

4. Potentially be used for CI/CD performance regression testing in the future.

The budget allowed a bit of headroom for the future.

[dist1ll]

Your MS-01 routes line-rate 25Gbps in software with VyOS w/o kernel bypass? That's very surprising to me. At what packet sizes?