Emu: Rapid Prototyping of Networking Services
Nik Sultana, Salvator Galea, David Greaves, Marcin Wójcik, Jonny Shipton, Richard G. Clegg, Luo Mai, Pietro Bressana, Robert Soulé, Richard Mortier, Paolo Costa, Peter R. Pietzuch, Jon Crowcroft, Andrew William Moore, Noa Zilberman · Cambridge University Engineering Department Publications Database · 2017
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.