NetCOPE: Platform for Rapid Development of Network Applications

Abstract

Rapid development in area of network technologies and the bandwidth increase to 1Gbps or 10Gbps puts more and more requirements to devices, that have to process or analyze a network traffic. The results from numerous research works show that the performance of conventional processors is not sufficient for many applications. As an reasonable alternative the splitting of computation task between a processor and an acceleration card with FPGA chips is proposed. This paper describes the basic scope of system architecture for rapid development of network applications based on the connection of a processor and an acceleration card-NetCOPE. The proposed platform implements the parts common for most of applications such as I/O blocks, connection of an application acceleration core to a system bus and fast DMA transfers. Using the platform a designer is concentrated on realization of the target application only and can easily move its designs to different development boards.