From:
"Jason Bothe via NANOG" <nanog@nanog.org>
To: "Drew Weaver" <drew.weaver@thenap.com>
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
Sent: Thursday, December 5, 2024 11:03:39 AM
Subject: Re: Route optimization using GPUs?
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.
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.