Optimizing Packet Accesses for a Domain Specific Language on Network Processors

Programming network processors remains a challenging task since their birth until recently when high-level programming environments for them are emerging. By employing domain specific languages for packet processing, the new environments try to hide hardware details from the programmers and enhance both the programmability of the systems and the portability of the applications. A frequent issue for the new environments to be widely adopted is their relatively low achievable performance compared to low-level, hand-tuned programming. In this paper we present two techniques, Packet Access Combining (PAC) and Compiler-Generated Packet Caching (CGPC), to optimize packet accesses, which are shown as the performance bottleneck in such new environments for packet processing applications. PAC merges multiple packet accesses into a single wider access; CGPC implements an automatic packet data caching mechanism without a hardware cache. Both techniques focus on reducing long memory latency and ex...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: LCPC
• Authors: Tao Liu, Xiao-Feng Li, Lixia Liu, Chengyong Wu, Roy Ju
• Keywords: LCPC 2005, Packet Accesses, Packet Processing, Programming Environment