NPCryptBench: a cryptographic benchmark suite for network processors

Authors:
Yao Yue;Chuang Lin;Zhangxi Tan
Affiliations:
Tsinghua University, China;Tsinghua University, China;University of California, Berkeley
Venue:
MEDEA '05 Proceedings of the 2005 workshop on MEmory performance: DEaling with Applications , systems and architecture
Year:
2005

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Abstract

Network processors (NPs), a type of multicore, multithread system that exploits system-on-chip techniques, usually adopt a distributed, shared memory hierarchy to scale up network processing. Network applications running on NP often display distinct characteristics on memory subsystem compared with traditional processors with multilevel cache. As security, especially cryptography, has become indispensable in today's networks, we present a benchmark suite called NPCryptBench. It is the first benchmark specially designed to evaluate cryptographic performance on NPs, particularly that of processor and memory subsystem. By running NPCryptBench on Intel IXP network processors, we provide quantitative evidence that performance bottlenecks under such a highly parallel environment reside in memory hierarchy and prolonged access latency, instead of limited computing resources described in recent literature. To alleviate this memory-wall effect, we suggest several software optimizations, which averagely boost the benchmark throughput by 145% on Intel IXP2800. Our analysis and optimizations are also suitable for other NPs with similar architectures.