Spinach: a liberty-based simulator for programmable network interface architectures

This paper presents Spinach, a new simulator toolset specifically designed to target programmable network interface architectures. Spinach models both system components that are common to all programmable environments (e.g., ALUs, control and data paths, registers, instruction processing) and components that are specific to the embedded systems and network interface environments (e.g., software-controlled scratchpad memory, hardware assists for DMA and medium access control). Spinach is built on the Liberty Simulation Environment (LSE) and exploits LSE’s modularity to support easy reconfiguration of programmable network interface cards (NICs) and embedded systems, enabling wide design space exploration with little or no code variation. For example, the same underlying C code is used whether supporting a uniprocessor Gigabit network interface, a multiprocessor Gigabit interface, or a multiprocessor 10 Gigabit interface with a highly heterogeneous memory system. The only difference...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: LCTRTS
• Authors: Paul Willmann, Michael Brogioli, Vijay S. Pai
• Keywords: Gigabit Network Interfaces, LCTRTS 2004, Network Interfaces, Programmable Network Interface, Software Engineering