Network Processing: Applications, Architectures and Examples

In conjunction with MICRO-34

Austin, Texas

December 2, 2001 Afternoon

Perhaps no area of computer architecture has shown as much commercial activity over the last five years as that of Network Processing. Five years ago embedded network tasks were implanted using COTS embedded processors (typically MIPS-based) and custom ASICs. Today the designs have their own name (NPU or network processors), an associated commercial conference, over two dozen startup companies and designs, and perhaps up to a dozen companies that have already failed. In other summary - a lot of activity, money and hype.

The purpose of this tutorial is to cut through the NPU hype in order to examine the core issues: applications, architectural features, and design examples.

Applications:

1. A brief review of the traditional layered network protocol model
2. Traditional services : routing and firewalls
3. The control-plane and data-plane model for systems and applications
4. Emerging services : security, Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantees, URL-based load balancing, network metering, multimedia transcoding, Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS), and Differentiated Services

Architectural Features:
1. Industry standard interfaces : Utopia, CSIX, RGI, GMII
2. SoC Features
3. Packet-Oriented DMA Models
4. Multi-Threading
5. Multi-Processors
6. Configurable hardware

Design Examples
1. Clearspeed
2. Clearwater
3. Chameleon
4. AMCC
5. Motorola
6. Intel
7. EZchip
8. Vitesse
9. Lexra
10. Broadcom

Tutorial Organizer:

Gokhan Memik     ([email protected])