A Throughput-Driven Task Creation and Mapping for Network Processors

Abstract. Network processors are programmable devices that can process packets at a high speed. A network processor is typified by multithreading and heterogeneous multiprocessing, which usually requires programmers to manually create multiple tasks and map these tasks onto different processing elements. This paper addresses the problem of automating task creation and mapping of network applications onto the underlying hardware to maximize their throughput. We propose a throughput cost model to guide the task creation and mapping with the objective of both minimizing the number of stages in the processing pipeline and maximizing the average throughput of the slowest task simultaneously. The average throughput is modeled by taking communication cost, computation cost, memory access latency and synchronization cost into account. We envision that programmers write small functions for network applications, such that we use grouping and duplication to construct tasks from the functions. T...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: HIPEAC
• Authors: Lixia Liu, Xiao-Feng Li, Michael K. Chen, Roy Dz-Ching Ju
• Keywords: Average Throughput, HIPEAC 2007, Network Applications, System Software, Throughput