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Apr. 28, 2010

Intel's new Wind River division has introduced what it calls an ultra-powerful packet-forwarding platform for overburdened wireless and telecom service providers.

According to a Wind River press release, when running on Linux on an Intel Xeon 5500-based reference motherboard, the new Network Acceleration Platform managed iPv4 packet forwarding at a rate of 21 million packets per second, and that's with using just four threads of the CPU.

The announcement of the Network Acceleration Platform was made yesterday at the combined Embedded Systems Conference and Multicore Exposition in San Jose, California.

The operating system used in the control plane of Wind River's network acceleration engine is either Wind River Linux or VxWorks. The platform's data plane runs on the lightweight Wind River Executive OS.

The combination of that small-footprint OS and the company's multicore-optimized networking protocol software that enables iPv4/iPv6 packet forwarding, adds up to the platform's packet-acceleration engine, says Wind River.

The company's senior product manager Felix Baum says that the new platform is intended to be flexible enough that telecom customers writing for it can choose to write their software to use the CPU cores at varying levels of multithreading, greatly enhancing the speed and network throughput to newer levels previously unheard of.

Acquired by Intel in June 2009, Wind River claims that this level of performance is more than five times that of the same hardware running native Linux in symmetric multiprocessing mode.

Baum added that "in some cases, it is even much faster if you have a dedicated algorithm that runs a single thread. You receive a packet, you process the packet, and you push it out without getting interruptions, without getting sidetracked by other things."

But doing so may waste a multicore processor's horsepower: "In many instances, these processors - these many individual cores - are way too powerful, and they can push packets and still have some slack." That slack can be used for any number of things - including using additional threads for more network acceleration.

The Network Acceleration Platform can also act as an "referee" between the CPU core and the networking silicon.

"In a perfect world, what we can do with our operating system and solution here is that we can actually go and set up the silicon so that we dictate the rules - we tell it what to do," said Baum.

And what it can do might be deep-packet inspection, virus-checking, and the like. "For example, we can specify and tell you - the silicon - that when you receive a packet, before you give it to me - the core - to process it, to look at the third bit and depending on it, do this, and look at the fifth bit, and do that. And here's the pattern I want you to match, and if any part of the packet matches this - a virus, for example - then go and do these things before even handing it off to me, the core," said Baum.

Wind River networking product line manager Mark Guinther says "this the time we grumble about our network service, or device, or both. For service providers, unhappy customers lead to increased churn and less revenue."

Guinther's solution plays into the strengths of his Intel associates. "Networking equipment designed on multi-core CPUs offers the increased performance capability, lower space, weight and power requirements, and scalable designs that wireless service providers need to win customers and reduce churn."

The Network Acceleration Platform manages the entire system. "We give users the tools to actually configure the whole system so it all happens once they flick the switch and the system reboots. They set up these devices in a particular fashion to help customers do what they're trying to do."

What those customers are trying to do is remove telecoms out of the hole they've dug for themselves by flooding their infrastructure with data traffic - an infrastructure that was originally designed for voice traffic.

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Source: Wind River.