Developing Custom Firmware for the Red Storm SeaStar Network Interface.
Kevin Pedretti, Trammell Hudson · 2005
The Red Storm SeaStar network interface contains an embedded PowerPC 440 CPU that, out-of-thebox, is used solely to handle network protocol processing. Since this is a fully programmable general purpose CPU, network researchers may wish to program it to perform additional tasks such as NIC-based collective operations and NIC-level computation. This paper describes our experiences developing custom firmware for the SeaStar. In order to make the SeaStar more accessible to non-experts, we have developed a C version of the assembly-based firmware provided by Cray. This high-level language firmware should be much easier to understand and to quickly extend with new features. A detailed overview of the SeaStar programming environment and our C firmware will be presented along with optimization techniques that we have found beneficial.