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Design considerations for network processor operating systems

Published: 26 October 2005 Publication History

Abstract

Network processors (NPs) promise a flexible, programmable packet processing infrastructure for network systems. To make full use of the capabilities of network processors, it is imperative to provide the ability to dynamically adapt to changing traffic patterns and to provide run-time support in the form of a network processor operating system. The differences to existing operating systems and the main challenges lie in the multiprocessor nature of NPs, their on-chip resources constraints, and the real-time processing requirements. In this paper, we explore the key design tradeoffs that need to be considered when designing a network processor operating system. In particular, we explore the performance impact of (1) application analysis for partitioning, (2) network traffic characterization, (3) workload mapping, and (4) run-time adaptation. We present and discuss qualitative and quantitative results in the context of a particular application analysis and mapping framework, but the observations and conclusions are generally applicable to any run-time environment for network processors.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ANCS '05: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM symposium on Architecture for networking and communications systems
October 2005
230 pages
ISBN:1595930825
DOI:10.1145/1095890
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 26 October 2005

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Author Tags

  1. application mapping
  2. application partitioning
  3. network processors

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  • (2016)Thread Assignment in Multicore/Multithreaded Processors: A Statistical ApproachIEEE Transactions on Computers10.1109/TC.2015.241753365:1(256-269)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2016
  • (2015)A resource utilization based instruction fetch policy for SMT processorsMicroprocessors & Microsystems10.1016/j.micpro.2014.10.00139:1(1-10)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2015
  • (2013)Thread Assignment of Multithreaded Network Applications in Multicore/Multithreaded ProcessorsIEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems10.1109/TPDS.2012.31124:12(2513-2525)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2013
  • (2012)Optimal task assignment in multithreaded processorsACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2248487.215100247:4(235-248)Online publication date: 3-Mar-2012
  • (2012)Optimal task assignment in multithreaded processorsACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News10.1145/2189750.215100240:1(235-248)Online publication date: 3-Mar-2012
  • (2012)Optimal task assignment in multithreaded processorsProceedings of the seventeenth international conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems10.1145/2150976.2151002(235-248)Online publication date: 3-Mar-2012
  • (2010)Thread to strand binding of parallel network applications in massive multi-threaded systemsACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/1837853.169348045:5(191-202)Online publication date: 9-Jan-2010
  • (2010)Thread to strand binding of parallel network applications in massive multi-threaded systemsProceedings of the 15th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming10.1145/1693453.1693480(191-202)Online publication date: 9-Jan-2010
  • (2009)Analytic modeling of network processors for parallel workload mappingACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems10.1145/1509288.15092908:3(1-29)Online publication date: 22-Apr-2009
  • (2009)Concurrent workload mapping for multicore security systemsConcurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience10.1002/cpe.142321:10(1281-1306)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2009
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