Programmable Logic for High Performance Networking

Speaker: Gordon Brebner, Xilinx Labs, USA

Talk Title: Programmable Logic for High Performance Networking

Abstract: The telecommunications equipment industry is now moving to data rates of 100 Gb/s and above, with 1 Tb/s on the horizon. In this talk, I will overview research in Xilinx Labs that has been directed to demonstrating that Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology can play a mainstream role in implementing the required functions at such data rates. In particular, I will focus on packet classification. The first part concerns a novel programmable packet parsing engine capable of extracting relevant keys at line rate. The second part concerns high-throughput lookup of such keys to make classification decisions.

This involves both on-FPGA memory lookup for small tables, and off-FPGA memory lookup for larger tables. In the former case, aside from the necessary lookup rates, a key figure of merit has been the average number of physical memory bits required per table data bit. Another concern has been efficient live table update. Good results have been obtained based on the work of Prasanna et al, for heavily pipelined implementations of tree and tries, and these will be overviewed. After the feasibility of practical implementations at a 100 Gb/s data rate had been verified, a prototype high-level programming environment that hides the FPGA completely was developed, and I will give a short demonstration of this.

Biography: Gordon Brebner is a Distinguished Engineer at Xilinx, Inc., the worldwide leader in programmable logic solutions. He works in Xilinx Labs in San José, California, USA, leading an international group researching issues surrounding networked processing systems of the future. His main personal research interests concern dynamically reconfigurable architectures, domain-specific languages with highly concurrent implementations, and high performance networking and telecommunications, with also a historical interest in computational complexity. He has authored numerous papers and the book "Computers in Communication", and holds many patents. Prior to joining Xilinx in 2002, Gordon was the Professor of Computer Systems at the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom, directing the Institute for Computing Systems Architecture. He continues to be an Honorary Professor at the University of Edinburgh, is a Ph.D. advisor at Santa Clara University, and is a visiting lecturer at Stanford University.

Host: Professor Viktor K. Prasanna

Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 324

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Janice Thompson