DPDK Summit 2026

At CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, DPDK has evolved from a performance enabler to a common technology for data acquisition and readout systems across multiple practical use-cases. It is deployed in production in multiple experiments like NA62 and in the prototype detectors at CERN’s Neutrino Platform, and forms part of the architectural foundation for large-scale experiments like DUNE.
For NA62, DPDK replaced a commercial, licensed networking solution, enabling a fully open-source readout stack with improved maintainability and long-term sustainability.
In the DUNE experiment’s prototypes, the challenge was not only transitioning from custom protocols to standard Ethernet, but scaling to multi-100Gbps UDP inputs per computing node. This required NUMA-aware architecture, RX queue partitioning, multi-process separation of control and data planes, memory pool tuning, burst optimization, and careful interrupt and polling strategies to sustain deterministic throughput.
The talk presents concrete architectural patterns, tuning strategies, and operational lessons from large-scale, long-running deployments for physics experiments at CERN.