Design and implementation of the PLUG architecture for programmable and efficient network lookups
Amit Kumar, Lorenzo De Carli, Sung Jin Kim, Marc de Kruijf, Karthikeyan Sankaralingam, Cristian Estan, Somesh Jha · 2010
This paper proposes a new architecture called Pipelined LookUp Grid (PLUG) that can perform data structure lookups in network processing. PLUGs are programmable and through simplicity achieve power efficiency. We draw upon one key insights: data structure lookups have natural structure that can be statically determined and exploited. The PLUG execution model transforms data-structure lookups into pipelined stages of computation and associates small code-blocks with data. The PLUG architecture is a tiled architecture with each tile consisting predominantly of SRAMs, a lightweight no-buffering router, and an array of lightweight computation cores. Using a principle of fixed delays in the execution model, the architecture is contention-free and completely statically scheduled thus achieving high energy efficiency. The architecture enables rapid deployment of new network protocols and generalizes as a data-structure accelerator.