Automated Task Allocation for Network Processors

Network processors have great potential to combine high performance with increased flexibility. These multiprocessor systems consist of programmable elements, dedicated logic, and specialized memory and interconnection networks. However, the architectural complexity of the systems makes programming difficult. Programmers must be able to productively implement high performance applications for network processors to succeed. Ideally, designers describe applications in a domain specific language (DSL). DSLs expedite the development process by providing component libraries, communication and computation semantics, visualization tools, and test suites for an application domain. An integral aspect of mapping applications described in a DSL to network processors is allocating computational tasks to processing elements. We formulate this task allocation problem for a popular network processor, the Intel IXP1200. This method proves to be computationally efficient and produces results that are within 5% of aggregate egress bandwidths achieved by hand-tuned implementations on two representative applications: IPv4 forwarding and DiffServ.