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EMU: Rapid prototyping of networking services

Published version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Conference Object

Change log

Authors

Sultana, N 
Galea, S 
Wójcik, M 
Shipton, J 

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.

Description

Keywords

Journal Title

Proceedings of the 2017 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, USENIX ATC 2017

Conference Name

2017 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, USENIX ATC 2017

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

USENIX Association
Sponsorship
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/K034723/1)
European Commission Horizon 2020 (H2020) Industrial Leadership (IL) (644866)