Building a 25 Gbit/s workstation for the SCION Association

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.

Most of this was "enthusiasts playing with bigboy stuff", but it turns out ok in the end.

Nice write up! For this sort of thing, I have leaned towards AMD Epyc, Intel e810, and DPDK for the software stack. Unfortunately, lately the supermicro H13SSL line of mobo's appear to have become near-unobtainable with ridiculous 6+ month lead times.

It is too bad this important work needed to be done on the cheap. You'd think if the Swiss National Bank was involved, you could get a proper budget....

It would have been a lot easier to focus on the important implementation details if the server was an off the shelf Lenovo datacenter server (SD550?) with a pair of 100 gig/s NVIDIA cards in it.

(Source: last month I set up a machine like this for a colleague to do approximately the same task. I spent "copy and paste the production server config" time on it, not a week.)

Wow, 249 CHF for 8x fans is insane. The grip Noctua has on people! Nice workstation.