Network Processor Modeling

Our work on NP system modeling is aimed at determining the throughput of a network processor given the following information:

• System topology.
• Workload characteristics.
• Technology parameters.

The system topology describes the parameters of a generalized network processor topology, which can be configured in terms of processing elements, shared interconnects, and memory interfaces. These parameters enable us to represent a wide range of possible NP architectures. The workload characteristics range from simple workload parameters to an ADAG representation of processing task obtained from automated profiling and mapping. The technology parameters determine the clock speeds, memory access delays etc.

The model considers the performance of processing resources given the assigned workload. The annotations of the ADAG give information on how many instructions are processed and how many memory accesses are performed by each processor. For shared resources (e.g., memory) queuing effects are considered that are caused by multiple parallel requests that can only be served in sequence.

The ability to quickly evaluate the performance of a particular configuration is important for design space exploration as well as randomized mapping.

Publications

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