User talk:Kerrpat

Wind River’s Network Acceleration Platform (NAP) is a new generation of embedded software platforms that implement a revolutionary approach to packet processing using multi-core processors. By adapting the networking protocol stack to run in parallel on multiple cores, unprecedented levels of packet throughput and processing efficiency can be achieved by network equipment.

== NOTE THAT THIS ARTICLE WILL BE TITLED Wind River Network Acceleration Platform

Overview
The transition from single-core to multi-core processors is significantly increasing packet processing performance at a time when it is most needed. Single processor technology is unable to keep pace with the growth of multi-media encrypted services and still remain cost competitive. By using multiple cores in parallel, processing capacity can be significantly increased while keeping power consumption, heat dissipation, circuit board real estate and cost per Mb/s at lower levels than for equivalent single-core solutions. However, multi-core processor cost-performance depends on the design of its software platform. Wind River Network Acceleration Platform delivers Multi-Gigabit packet processing for network infrastructure equipment using multi-core technologies. The platform is a comprehensive, fully integrated multi-core run-time environment with control plane operating system support and data plane acceleration software. NAP provides a way to leverage multi-core architectures to accelerate the performance of the standard Linux networking stack. Its uniquely integrated Asymmetric Multi-Processing(AMP) configuration provides a Linux management operating system working in combination with a small executive running on dedicated cores to provide protocol acceleration. This integrated approach allows the system to act as a single networking stack support to all of the IP protocols of Linux while accelerating key protocols and functionality to boost overall system performance.

Platform Architecture
The Wind River Network Acceleration Platform implements an innovative AMP architecture that partitions the system into data and control planes using separate operating systems. NAP’s AMP design can achieve superior performance scalability than Symmetrical Multi-Processing (SMP) architectures which are limited by common memory, input/output (I/O) and other resource constraints. The addition of cores in SMP systems typically result in a premature flattening of the throughput curve, while as cores are added to Wind River’s AMP-based NAP, throughput increases linearly.

The NAP architecture separates control and data plane functions. Data plane acceleration is achieved by reserving a group of cores called Network Acceleration Engines (NAE), which are dedicated to packet processing. Each NAE runs a multi-core optimized set of networking protocols that can run in parallel with the Linux system on the management cores. The platform includes Wind River Linux, a fast real-time mini-executive and high-performance networking software. The platform also includes a lightweight hypervisor to load and configure individual cores and to provide memory protection. The networking-specific software stack includes IPv4/IPv6, IPsec, UDP, TCP, and STCP packet acceleration protocols optimized for specific multi-core processors.

The key platform functions are:

Data Acceleration Plane: NAP off-loads packet forwarding to a group of processor cores referred to as Network Acceleration Engines (NAE). Each NAE is assigned a packet flow in which interrupts are not used so that the core can allocate all its processing capacity to maximize packet throughput. Because packet forwarding does not require a fully-featured operating system (OS), NAE implements a bare metal executive, called Wind River Executive (WRE), which is a specially designed mini-run-time executive. The data plane includes a control NAE (cNAE) which manages its configuration. Change requests are sent to/from the control plane and implemented by the cNAE on the specified cores.

Control Plane: The control plane runs on a single OS (Linux or VxWorks) providing the system’s management capabilities such as inter-processor communications, dynamic updates to tables, and establishing and resetting the state of individual cores. It includes a user space application called Wind River Network Acceleration Daemon (WRnad) that listens for and propagates network events such as route updates. The multi-OS Inter-Processor Communication (MIPC) function provides high speed communications between data plane applications and the management plane. A lightweight type 1 hypervisor is used to configure, load, boot and initialize cores and to allocate memory areas for efficient access and use of memory. The hypervisor requires no processing overhead during forwarding thus allowing the cores to run at full capacity.

Wind River Tools: To exploit multi-core’s full performance and flexibility potential, significant changes are required to implement a concurrent programming model where tasks can be executed in parallel. Wind River Workbench provides developers with a comprehensive set of debugging, code analysis, advanced visualization, root cause analysis and verification capabilities that have been specially designed to support multi-core software development, reducing design, verification and de-bugging time and effort.

Wind River Professional Services: These services provide support to equipment developers by a team of experienced and knowledgeable experts. The services include platform customization, multi-core tuning, feature acceleration, and porting of existing applications to the NAP environment.

Network Stack
NAP has adapted the network protocol stack to run in parallel on multiple cores. The following network protocols, available in NAP 2.0, are optimized for multi-core networking on 1G and 10G interfaces:

Benefits
Wind River Network Acceleration platform has been purposely designed to address today’s challenges faced by network equipment providers:

a) Delivers performance required by high bandwidth networks: NAP provides significantly higher packet processing throughput than that achieved by a native Linux stack. It scales linearly as cores are added. b) Provides a time-to-market advantage: NAP is a comprehensive, integrated software platform from one supplier. It incorporates a ready-to-use set of components supported by an effective development toolset to shorten network equipment development cycles. Wind River’s On-board Program pre-integrates NAP with the latest Advanced Telecommunication Computing Architecture (ATCA) hardware products from industry-leading Commercial off-the Shelf (COTS) board suppliers.

c) Reduces Risk: NAP incorporates a multi-core optimized development environment with comprehensive prototyping, simulation, de-bugging, analysis and test capabilities. Wind River professional services provides a single point of contact for all NAP components, providing global support for design migration, optimization and problem resolution services.

d) Reduces Costs: Product costs are reduced since NAP consolidates multiple control and data planes into one system.. Lower development costs are achieved through NAP’s integrated, ready-to-use platform and development environment toolset.