Design and implementation of the PLUG architecture for programmable and efficient network lookups

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 the insights that 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. This paper describes the PLUG architecture, the compiler, and evaluates our RTL prototype PLUG chip synthesized on a 55nm technology library. We evaluate six diverse high-end network processing workloads including IPv4, IPv6, and Ethernet forwarding. We show that at a 55nm technology, a 16-tile PLUG occupies 58mm2, provides 4MB on-chip storage, and sustains a clock frequency of 1 GHz. This translates to 1 billion lookups per second, a latency of 18ns to 219ns, and average power less than 1 watt.