EMU: Rapid prototyping of networking services
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Authors
Sultana, Nikolai
Galea, S
Wójcik, M
Shipton, J
Clegg, RG
Mai, L
Bressana, P
Soulé, R
Costa, P
Pietzuch, P
Publication Date
2019-01-01Journal Title
Proceedings of the 2017 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, USENIX ATC 2017
Publisher
USENIX Association
Pages
459-471
Language
English
Type
Article
This Version
VoR
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Sultana, N., Galea, S., Greaves, D., Wójcik, M., Shipton, J., Clegg, R., Mai, L., et al. (2019). EMU: Rapid prototyping of networking services. Proceedings of the 2017 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, USENIX ATC 2017, 459-471. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.13009
Abstract
Due to their performance and flexibility, FPGAs are an attractive platform for the execution of network functions.
It has been a challenge for a long time though to make FPGA programming accessible to a large audience of developers. An appealing solution is to compile code from a general-purpose language to hardware using high-level synthesis. Unfortunately, current approaches to implement rich network functionality are insufficient because they lack: (i) libraries with abstractions for common network operations and data structures, (ii) bindings
to the underlying “substrate” on the FPGA, and (iii) debugging
and profiling support.
This paper describes Emu, a new standard library for an FPGA hardware compiler that enables developers to rapidly create and deploy network functionality. Emu allows for high-performance designs without being bound to particular packet processing paradigms. Furthermore, it supports running the same programs on CPUs, in Mininet, and on FPGAs, providing a better development environment that includes advanced debugging capabilities.
We demonstrate that network functions implemented using Emu have only negligible resource and performance overheads compared with natively-written hardware versions.
Sponsorship
EPSRC (EP/K034723/1)
European Commission Horizon 2020 (H2020) Industrial Leadership (IL) (644866)
Identifiers
This record's DOI: https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.13009
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/266970
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