Application of a multi-processor soc platform to high-speed packet forwarding
Pierre G. Paulin, Chuck Pilkington, Essaid Bensoudane, Michel Langevin, D. Lyonnard · 2004
In this paper, we explore the requirements of emerging complex SoC’s and describe StepNP, an experimental flexible, multi-processor SoC platform targeted towards communications and networking applications. We present the results of mapping an internet protocol (IPv4) packet forwarding application, running at 2.5Gb/s and 10Gb/s. We demonstrate how the use of high-speed hardware-assisted messaging and dynamic task allocation in the StepNP platform allows us to achieve very high processor utilization rates (up to 97%) in spite of the presence of high network-on-chip and memory access latencies. The inter-processor communication overhead is kept very low, representing only 9 % of instructions. 1.