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Application Note:
Multicore Meets Growing Demand for High Performance Packet
Processing
At the beginning of the design phase of
equipment, one of the most important designers' phases is to
evaluate a complete configuration of fully operational packet
processing software. This is to gage the real application's
performance as to how it will run on the selected MC hardware.
The main questions to be answered are:
- What is the impact, in a full-featured implementation,
of all the required protocols on the system's
performance?
- How modular is the implementation, to perform only the
necessary processing for a dedicated application and
progressively introduce new features without redesigning the
software?
- What is the impact on global performance after the
integration of Data Plane functions with the Control
Plane?
- How does performance scale over the number of cores?
6WIND has made available an Application Note
dissecting such issues. This Application Note shows that only
a Fast Path-based architecture integrating a large number of
protocols is able to fulfill the requirements of real
equipment. It also scales linearly on a large number of
cores.
The Application Note analyzes performance
benchmarks. IP forwarding performance benchmarks are a good
starting point but benchmarks on a stand alone implementation
that is not designed to integrate the required additional
protocols are not sufficient. Only performance benchmarks made
on a complete implementation are relevant.
This Application Note also provides detailed
information about performance for well-known protocols such as
L2 / L3 encapsulation, IPsec, NAT & firewall and a method
to evaluate the performance of a complete networking
layer.
The complete Application Note is
available here.
Online Multicore Packet
Processing Forum
In September, 6WIND began a dedicated online Multicore Packet Processing Forum to
provide the community with the latest information and
resources about networking and telecommunications
applications, and embedded multicore networking software.
The first weeks of the Forum have been very
productive with high quality posts by experts from industry
market leaders including Cavium Networks, Netlogic, Nokia
Siemens Networks and 6WIND. You will find information on a
large range of hot topics including:
- Multicore packet processing at the heart of
convergence
- Advantages and disadvantages of multi-threading in
next-generation multicore processors
- Virtualization for network-based multicore
telecommunication systems
- Multicore packet processing - performance benchmarks
- Why standard OS networking stacks, like Linux's, are not
well adapted to multicore packet processing?
Thanks in advance for visiting this Forum. If
you would like to contribute to the Forum, you are more than
welcomed. Please use the online submission form or e-mail: contact@multicorepacketprocessing.com.
CompactPCI & ATCA
Newsletter Article - November Issue
The
November issue of CompactPCI & ATCA email newsletter
includes 6WIND's CEO article, "Multicore-Based AdvancedTCA architectures: High
availability key in networking layer". It discusses
the impact of equipment high availability requirements on a
multicore based networking layer.
Embedded Computing Design
Article - November Issue
The November issue
of Embedded Computing Design includes 6WIND's CEO article, "Multicore progressively powers networking
equipment with high-performance software". It explains
how advanced network services can be initially implemented
without any Fast Path and progressively introduced at the Fast
Path level as bandwidth and performance increases. This
approach is particularly effective in implementing incremental
cost-effective development steps for network and
telecommunications equipment. | 
