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Network acceleration stack tackles growing IP traffic
2010-04-27 Article Rating:  / 0
Wind River announced a networking acceleration stack for Linux and VxWorks aimed at accelerating IP packet forwarding on carrier-grade telecommunications equipment. The Wind River Network Acceleration Platform manages processing operations over multiple cores to accelerate control and data plane activities and deliver "multiple gigabit Ethernet wire-speed performance," says the company.
Aimed at meeting growing demands on 3G, 4G, and wireline networks, the Wind River Network Acceleration Platform is initially available in May with an Intel Xeon 5500 based reference board, but will run on Cavium's Octeon and Freescale QorIQ networking SoCs as well as future Intel Xeon processor architectures "at a later date," says Wind River. The company says it plans to spin future multi-core acceleration solutions for other market segments requiring substantial packet processing, including deep packet inspection and security acceleration.  Wind River Network Acceleration Platform architecture (Click to enlarge) Wind River Network Acceleration Platform also includes a lightweight hypervisor "to provide carrier-grade protection for software running on individual cores," says the company. Wind River offers no more details on the hypervisor, but it would appear to be a version of the Wind River Hypervisor, which in February was updated to version 1.1. Wind River Hypervisor 1.1 adds support for Intel "Nehalem" processors, such as the Xeon 5500 and Intel Core i5/i7 processors, and also enables new inter-virtual machine communications, according to the company. In addition, Wind River says it is providing Network Acceleration developers with multi-core enabled development, testing, debugging, and simulation tools required to simulate and test systems in complex multi-core environments. Here, the company appears to be referring to the newly multi-core optimized Wind River Workbench 3.2 integrated development environment, now synchronized with Eclipse 3.5. Workbench includes the newly upgraded, JTAG-based Wind River On-Chip Debugging 3.2, which adds multi-core and multi-target support, and is accompanied by an upgraded Wind River Compiler 5.8. The new Wind River Hypervisor 1.1 added specific support for the updated debugger. 21 million packets per secondAccording to Wind River benchmark tests, its Network Acceleration Platform measured IPv4 forwarding performance of 21 million packets per second, utilizing four processor threads on an Intel Xeon 5500 series processor-based system running Linux. The benchmark results represent five times the performance of the same system running native Linux networking in symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) mode without the acceleration stack, claims Wind River. The Layer 3 forwarding test for packet processing equaled the forwarding throughput of more than 14 gigabit Ethernet ports, using only 50 percent of the available cores for forwarding, says the company. The testing was said to simulate conditions on a production network, and the test system included a Linux control plane in addition to the data plane. Gearing up for 4GIn conjunction with the CGL 4.0 version of Wind River Linux, Wind River Network Acceleration Platform addresses the challenges that are emerging as telecom providers race to provide 4G wireless services to meet growing IP traffic. Similarly, in October Wind River's Cavium-owned rival MontaVista Software released MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition (CGE) 5.1, with new features that focus on 4G traffic. CGE 5.1 added support for the SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol) multi-homing and transparent failover standard, as well IPSEC with IKEv2 protocols, which are both required by both the LTE and WiMAX 4G standards. The new release also offered support for the open source "OpenSAF" 3.0 high availability (HA) middleware implementation, among other enhancements. Stated Simon Stanley, analyst at large for telecom-oriented market research firm Heavy Reading, "Multi-core creates an entirely new set of complexities to consider and the software in multi-core architectures is becoming increasingly significant. Companies ready with tested and integrated multi-core solutions, such as Wind River, are definitely on the right track with this trend and put themselves in an advantageous position." Stated Mike Langlois, VP and GM, Networking and Telecommunications, Wind River, "Our customers have the mandate to solve the ever-increasing bottleneck created by explosive data traffic growth and at the same time increase ARPU (average revenue per user) by providing advanced packet handling solutions. Wind River Network Acceleration Platform aims directly at these industry challenges." Availability Wind River’s Network Acceleration Platform will be available in May for current Intel processors including the Intel Xeon 5500, with plans to release the stack at a later date on platforms including Cavium Octeon, Freescale QorIQ, and future Intel Xeon processor architectures, says Wind River. A network acceleration upgrade kit is said to be available for existing customers of Wind River Linux and VxWorks. The kit is said to include multi-core networking software, a real-time Wind River Executive, and a lightweight hypervisor. Wind River will offer more information on the product at the ESC Silicon Valley and Multicore Expo show this week at booth 2302. More details on Wind River's ESC activities may be found here. More information on Network Acceleration may also appear on Wind River's site, here. Related Stories:
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