Application specific processor with high level synthesized instructions (abstract only)

Abstract

The paper deals with the design of application-specific processor which uses high level synthesized instruction engines. This approach is demonstrated on the instance of high speed network flow measurement processor for FPGA. Our newly proposed concept called Software Defined Monitoring (SDM) relies on advanced monitoring tasks implemented in the software supported by a configurable hardware accelerator. The monitoring tasks reside in the software and can easily control the level of detail retained by the hardware for each flow. This way, the measurement of bulk/uninteresting traffic is offloaded to the hardware, while the interesting traffic is processed in the software. SDM enables creation of flexible monitoring systems capable of deep packet inspection at high throughput. We introduce the processor architecture and a workflow that allows to create hardware accelerated measurement modules (instructions) from the description in C/C++ language. The processor offloads various aggregations and statistics from the main system CPU. The basic type of offload is the NetFlow statistics aggregation. We create and evaluate three more aggregation instructions to demonstrate the flexibility of our system. Compared to the hand-written instructions, the high level synthesized instructions are slightly worse in terms of both FPGA resources consumption and frequency. However, the time needed for development is approximately half.