packetC Language for High Performance Packet Processing

Duncan, Ralph; Jungck, Peder

doi:10.1109/hpcc.2009.89

Cited by 27 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…Since another paper [2] provides an overview of the packetC language, this discussion sketches selected features that are most involved with parallelism. Language constructs central to the paper's concern, databases and records, are discussed in detail by the subsequent section.…”

Section: Packetc Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

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PacketC Language and Parallel Processing of Masked Databases

Duncan¹,

Jungck²,

Ross³

2010

2010 39th International Conference on Parallel Processing

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Network packet processing's increasing speeds and volume create an incentive to use parallel processing. Such processing often involves comparing selected packet data to the contents of large tables (e.g., for routing packets or controlling system access). Thus, commercial systems often use multiple network processors [1] to provide parallel processing in general and use associative memory chips to provide parallel table operations in particular. Parallel network programming is usually done in a C dialect with machine-specific extensions. The associative memory capabilities are often provided by ternary content addressable memory (TCAM) chips in order to supply the fast, masking-based searches needed in this domain. TCAM use is normally controlled by vendor software, rather than by the application developer. Thus, an application is typically restricted to a small number of predefined templates and mediated by vendor system software. Thus, application developers cannot use high-level languages to express network table operations in an intuitive, portable way, nor exploit parallel devices like TCAMs in a flexible manner. This paper presents CloudShield's packetC ® language [2], a C dialect that hides most host-machine specifics, supports coarse-grain parallelism and supplies high-level data type and operator extensions for packet processing. We describe packetC's database and record constructs that support network application table operations, including masked matching. We show how our implementation of packetC with network processors, FPGAs and TCAMs lets the user enjoy parallel performance benefits without the usual vendor constraints or reliance on hardware-specific programming.

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Section: Packetc Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, the model frees application developers to concentrate on what is distinctive in their application, rather than what is common to virtually all of them. We describe processing and accessing this layer information in another paper [2].…”

Section: ) Includementioning

confidence: 99%

PacketC Language and Parallel Processing of Masked Databases

Duncan¹,

Jungck²,

Ross³

2010

2010 39th International Conference on Parallel Processing

Self Cite

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“…The programs are typically expressed with a restricted programming language, in order to reduce the risk of negatively impacting performance (e.g., removing unbounded loops), and to increase system safety (e.g., forbidding flexible, pointer-based memory accesses). This is the approach used by packetC [94], protocol oblivious forwarding [95] (POF), Linux's enhanced Berkeley Packet Filter [96] (eBPF) and Domino [97], which mainly differ for the target platforms and for the state access model. For instance, packetC and POF target network processors, eBPF is usually executed within the Linux kernel but can be offloaded to some SmartNICs, while Domino targets high-performance ASIC implementations.…”

Section: Programming Abstractionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Survey of Performance Acceleration Techniques for Network Function Virtualization

et al. 2019

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The ongoing network softwarization trend holds the promise to revolutionize network infrastructures by making them more flexible, reconfigurable, portable, and more adaptive than ever. Still, the migration from hard-coded/hardwired network functions towards their software-programmable counterparts comes along with the need for tailored optimizations and acceleration techniques, so as to avoid, or at least mitigate, the throughput/latency performance degradation with respect to fixed function network elements. The contribution of this article is twofold. First, we provide a comprehensive overview of the host-based Network Function Virtualization (NFV) ecosystem, covering a broad range of techniques, from low level hardware acceleration and bump-in-the-wire offloading approaches, to highlevel software acceleration solutions, including the virtualization technique itself. Second, we derive guidelines regarding the design, development, and operation of NFV-based deployments that meet the flexibility and scalability requirements of modern communication networks.

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“…packetC [36] is a domain-specific language for packet processing. packetC is more expressive than P4 and allows access to packet payloads, while P4 only permits header inspection and modification.…”

Section: Packet-processing Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

DC.p4

Sivaraman

Kim²,

Krishnamoorthy³

et al. 2015

Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCOMM Symposium on Software Defined Networking Research

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The P4 programming language [29,16] has been recently proposed as a high-level language to program the forwarding plane of programmable packet processors, spanning the spectrum from software switches through FPGAs, NPUs and reconfigurable hardware switches. This paper presents a case study that uses P4 to express the forwarding plane behavior of a data-center switch, comparable in functionality to single-chip shared-memory switches found in many data centers today.This case study allows us to understand how specific P4 constructs were useful in modeling specific data-center switch features. We also outline additional language constructs that needed to be added to P4 to support certain features of a data-center switch. We discuss several lessons that we learned in the process and distill these into a proposal for how P4 could evolve in the future.

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packetC Language for High Performance Packet Processing

Cited by 27 publications

References 4 publications

PacketC Language and Parallel Processing of Masked Databases

PacketC Language and Parallel Processing of Masked Databases

Survey of Performance Acceleration Techniques for Network Function Virtualization

DC.p4

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