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In this paper, we present five case studies of advanced networking functions that detail how a network processor (NP) can provide high performance and also the necessary flexibility compared with Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs). We first review the basic NP system architectures, and describe the IBM PowerNP architecture from a data-plane as well as from a control-plane point of view. We introduce models for the programmer's views of NPs that facilitate a global understanding of NP software programming. Then, for each case study, we present results from prototypes as well as general considerations that apply to a wider range of system architectures. Specifically, we investigate the suitability of NPs for Quality of Service (active queue management and traffic engineering), header processing (GPRS tunneling protocol), intelligent forwarding (load balancing without flow disruption), payload processing (code interpretation and just-in-time compilation in active networks), and protocol stack termination (SCTP). Finally, we summarize the key features as revealed by each case study, and conclude with remarks on the future of NPs.

DMA-capable interconnects, providing ultra-low latency and high bandwidth, are increasingly being used in the context of distributed storage and data processing systems. However, the deployment of such systems in virtualized data centers is currently inhibited by the lack of a flexible and high-performance virtualization solution for RDMA network interfaces. In this work, we present a hybrid virtualization architecture which builds upon the concept of separation of paths for control and data operations available in RDMA. With hybrid virtualization, RDMA control operations are virtualized using hypervisor involvement, while data operations are set up to bypass the hypervisor completely. We describe HyV (Hybrid Virtualization), a virtualization framework for RDMA devices implementing such a hybrid architecture. In the paper, we provide a detailed evaluation of HyV for different RDMA technologies and operations. We further demonstrate the advantages of HyV in the context of a real distributed system by running RAMCloud on a set of HyV-enabled virtual machines deployed across a 6-node RDMA cluster. All of the performance results we obtained illustrate that hybrid virtualization enables bare-metal RDMA performance inside virtual machines while retaining the flexibility typically associated with paravirtualization.

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