Taming the IXP network processor
PLDI '03 Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2003 conference on Programming language design and implementation
packetC Language for High Performance Packet Processing
HPCC '09 Proceedings of the 2009 11th IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications
NetPDL: An extensible XML-based language for packet header description
Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking
C compiler design for a network processor
IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems
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Network packet processing applications increasingly execute at speeds of 1-40 Gigabits per second, often running on multi-core chips that contain multithreaded network processing units (NPUs) and a general-purpose processor core. Such applications are typically programmed in a language that exposes NPU specifics needed to optimize low-level thread control and resource management. This facilitates optimization at the cost of increased software complexity and reduced portability. In contrast, our approach provides portability by combining coarse-grained, SPMD parallelism with programming in the packetC language's high-level constructs. This paper focuses on searching packet contents for packet protocol headers. We require the host system to locate protocol headers for layers 2, 3 and 4, and to encode their offsets data in a packet information block (PIB). packetC provides descriptors, C-style structures superimposed on the packet array at runtime-calculable, user or PIB-supplied offsets. We deliver state-of-the-practice performance via an FPGA for locating layer offsets and via micro-coded interpretation that treats PIB layer offsets as a special addressing mode.