This short paper describes the NetFPGA system, an FPGA-based platform originally created as a teaching tool to give students experience with network physical and link layers. It is currently in version 2, the main difference from version 1 being its format, using PCI and requiring no specialized backplanes or rack.
NetFPGA sounds like a great tool for people who want practical experience in developing networking hardware but cannot due to cost and complexity of such activities; networking researchers now needn't rely solely on software routing for their implementations. I don't know what their current status of running software on the actual boards is; apparently the software part of the routers was not initially run on the boards and required some outside computer, which is unfortunate.
2 comments:
We (Ganesh and David) are implementing shadow ports and elastic switches using NetFPGA. The strategy is to specify the control state machine in Verilog, so embedded software is not a requirement.
Good point; I brought it up because the paper explicitly mentioned the "fast" and "slow" router implementations students had done as projects, with the "slow" part being done entirely in software, which I took to mean something higher level than Verilog.
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