Virtually Pipelined Network Memory

We introduce virtually-pipelined memory, an architectural technique that efficiently supports high-bandwidth, uniform latency memory accesses, and high-confidence throughput even under adversarial conditions. We apply this technique to the network processing domain where memory hierarchy design is an increasingly challenging problem as network bandwidth increases. Virtual pipelining provides a simple to analyze programing model of a deep pipeline (deterministic latencies) with a completely different physical implementation (a memory system with banks and probabilistic mapping). This allows designers to effectively decouple the analysis of their algorithms and data structures from the analysis of the memory buses and banks. Unlike specialized hardware customized for a specific data-plane algorithm, our system makes no assumption about the memory access patterns. In the domain of network processors this will be of growing importance as the size of the routing tables, the complexity o...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: MICRO
• Authors: Banit Agrawal, Timothy Sherwood
• Keywords: Hardware, Latency Memory Accesses, Memory Hierarchy Design, MICRO 2006, Packet Buffering