Network Processing on an SPE Core in Cell Broadband Engine

Cell Broadband EngineTM is a multi-core system on a chip and is composed of a general-purpose Power Processing Element (PPE) and eight Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs). Its high computational performance is achieved mainly through the SPE’s processing power. New high-speed NICs such as 10-Gbps Ethernet require significant amounts of processing power. Even the full processing power of PPE is insufficient to attain the maximum bandwidth on 10-Gbps Ethernet, when running Linux on Cell Broadband EngineTM . In order to avoid the bottlenecks of PPE processing, we implemented a NIC driver and a protocol stack on an SPE. We selected a small protocol stack that is designed for embedded systems and made size reductions to put both a protocol stack and a NIC driver onto a single SPE. Due to the size limitation of the SPE’s local storage (256-KB). As a result, the protocol processing on an SPE is almost at wire speed for UDP and about 8.5 Gbps for TCP with lightly tuned code, and it r...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: HOTI
• Authors: Yuji Kawamura, Takeshi Yamazaki, Hiroshi Kyusojin, Tatsuya Ishiwata, Kazuyoshi Horie
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, HOTI 2008, Processing Power, Protocol Stack, SPE’s Processing Power