SCION 25 Gbit/s Workstation
This is an LGA4677 socket and it's about to be fitted with a 12-core Intel Xeon CPU to power the 64 PCIe Gen5 lanes for 3x Mellanox NVIDIA BlueField-2 Dual-25G smart NICs, which will ultimately power the SCION Association's new 25 Gbit/s testbench workstation!
I built it to develop and test a new AF_XDP underlay for the SCION OSS has received significant data plane performance improvements over the past years, but still requires further work.
In this article, I'll walk you through the entire planning, building, and configuration process in almost full detail.
It’s hard to say how many hours went into it, but it was clearly a multi-week endeavor. In total it cost us CHF ~3,741.34 (around ≈$4,700 USD) in materials. See the complete list of components at the end.
Disclaimer: I spent many hours writing this article by hand, but I must confess, LLMs did help me formulate and polish parts of it.
Background
SCION
SCION (Scalability, Control, and Isolation On Next-Generation Networks), is, in a nutshell, an IETF draft-stage technology of a growing alternative to the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). It's an innovative inter-AS routing architecture designed to address BGP's fundamental flaws and security vulnerabilities.
Maybe at some point in the future the Internet will run SCION, although a more likely scenario is that SCION and BGP will run alongside each other. What is clear, though, is that critical infrastructure should run on SCION, where:
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