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Highly integrated, low-power and standards-based programmable multi-core processors are available just in time for next generation telecom applications that need to process compute intensive applications such as lawful interception, security and application based traffic classification and routing. To take full advantage of multi-core’s high-performance and low power, systems designers need a processor, hardware platform and software solution that addresses the key issues such as throughput, bottleneck avoidance, redundancy and manageability.
Multi-core processors can handle compute-intensive tasks that are far beyond the capabilities of traditional single-core chips. New multi-core chips pack a large number of compute cycles with memory controllers, networking interfaces and specific hardware acceleration in a single chip with low power. This high integration and processing power makes multi-core processors ideal for next-generation telecom and networking infrastructure systems such as routers, switches, gateways, wireless aggregation devices, storage networking equipment and servers.
RadiSys has choosen the widely adopted Cavium Networks OCTEON MIPS64 Multicore family of processors for future application networking elements. The highest end OCTEON processor features up to 16 cores operating at 1 GHz, with the industry’s most advanced hardware accelerators for packet processing, scheduling, QoS, TCP, compression decompression, security and pattern matching.
The OCTEON architecture is optimized for wire-speed Layer 2 through Layer 7 packet processing applications at up to full-duplex 10 Gbps, while simultaneously processing security or other deep packet inspection functions. For example, OCTEON CN5860 can process 20Gbps+ of TCP traffic with 1KB packets or over 2 Million+ TCP setup and teardown connections1. Figure 1 illustrates the OCTEON internal chip block diagram showing the different blocks provided to enable the horsepower necessary for processing applications at wire-speed applications.
With the advent of ATCA (Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture) and AMC (Advanced Mezzanine Cards), system designers now have an excellent way to leverage industry standard off-the-shelf solutions for both hardware and software to get a head-start in developing their network elements. For example, RadiSys ATCA and AMC solutions now include products based on the Cavium OCTEON Plus CN58XX processor, such as the RadiSys Promentum® ATCA-72xx Gigabit Ethernet Line card for ATCA systems.
RadiSys products using Cavium OCTEON MIPS64 Multicore processors support a standard programming model using C with GNU toolchain and Linux, VxWorks and other well known operating systems. To achieve maximum performance and adhere to existing software architectures many system designs want to partition software applications into fast path and control-path by dividing CPU cores across different partitions.
This optimization and mapping while being a well known process using C programming language will require precious time and can add time to the overall development schedule. To help equipment vendors reduce development costs and time-to-market, thereby improving their competitive positions, RadiSys offers optional production-ready datapath software for hardware-accelerated IPV4/IPV6 forwarding and security tasks such as IPsec, SSL and SRTP, as well as IP filtering and traffic management. RadiSys also provides management and control plane APIs in support of the datapath. These Linux-based APIs are supported on Wind River’s carrier-grade Linux platform, with support of other Linux products available.
System architecture also weighs into packet-processing requirements based on application-specific throughput requirements, partitioning, data flow and other factors, such as redundancy. To harness the power of multi-core processors such as OCTEON, systems designers need to address issues such as ensuring that the data flow in the system-level architecture is set up properly for throughput, bottleneck avoidance, redundancy and manageability. Control over those issues is critical in applications that require wired-speed packet processing.
The ATCA-72xx uses a AMC carrier card (ATCA-1200) and AMC-7211 to enable a high density Gigabit Ethernet Line card with powerful packet processing capability. The modularity of the AMC can also be leveraged in a compute module such as ATCA-4300 to enable a server with significant IPSec offload engine or other packet processing capability.
The advantage of ATCA is even greater when system designers make use of application-ready platforms that incorporate such wire-speed packet-processing solutions. RadiSys’ integrated 10G platform – incorporating 10GE switching for data plane, with the Cavium-based solution and other modules has allowed customers to create a common platform with powerful networking and packet-processing capabilities.