NeTS:Small:A Unified Lookup Framework to Enable the Rapid Deployment of New Protocols in High-Speed Routers

高端路由器和交换机根据网络数据包内容对大数据执行性能关键型查找。目前的设计依靠专门的硬件模块来实现高性能。虽然大多数协议都足够了，但不断涌现的新协议会带来问题；要部署这些协议，需要昂贵的设备升级。为了支持新的数据平面协议的快速部署，我们需要一个灵活的硬件/软件框架。这个项目正在为未来的网络设备开发这样一个统一的框架，包括四个组件：a)表示硬件的抽象执行模型，b)用于简化实现的工具链，d)协议的定量性能评估，d)专门用于网络协议中核心操作的可编程硬件体系结构。利用平铺体系结构的趋势，该项目正在开发一种专门的平铺体系结构，将计算移动到更接近存储的位置，从而提供高效的查找。该项目还在调查这些设计方法如何从协议处理扩展到入侵防御、应用程序识别和其他功能所需的有效负载检查。部署和实现新的协议是具有挑战性的。该项目将为高端路由器提供灵活的硬件规格。这种使用单一链条和体系结构框架支持多种协议的灵活性将降低未来高端路由器的开发成本，并加快新协议的部署。另一个结果将是向学术界发布工具链的开源版本，用于开发协议的高速实现、各种协议的参考实现、标准数据集以及所提议的硬件体系结构的NetFPGA实现。

High-end routers and switches perform performance-critical lookupsinto large data based on network packet content. Current designs relyon specialized hardware modules for high performance. While mostlysufficient, emerging new protocols create a problem; for these to bedeployed, expensive equipment upgrades are required. To support the rapid deployment of new data plane protocols, we need a flexible hardware/software framework.This project is developing such a unified framework for futurenetwork devices with four components: a) an abstract execution modelto represent hardware, b) a toolchain to ease implementation, d)quantitative performance evaluation of protocols, and d) programmablehardware architectures specialized for the core operations in networkprotocols. Leveraging trends in tiled architectures, the project isdeveloping a specialized tiled architecture that moves computation closeto storage and thus provide efficient lookups. The project is alsoinvestigating how these design methodologies extend beyond protocolprocessing to payload inspection as required by intrusion prevention,application identification and other functionality.Deploying and implementing new protocols is challenging. This projectwill result in specification of flexible hardware for high-endrouters. This flexibility to support multiple protocols using a singletoolchain and architecture framework will reduce development costs offuture high-end routers and speedup the deployment of newprotocols. Another outcome will be the open-source release tothe academic community of the toolchain for developing high-speedimplementation of protocols, reference implementations of variousprotocols, standard data sets, and a NetFPGA implementation of theproposed hardware architecture.