NetThreads: Programming NetFPGA with Threaded Software

As FPGA-based systems including soft processors become
increasingly common, we are motivated to better understand
the architectural trade-offs and improve the efficiency of
these systems. The traditional forwarding and routing are
now well understood problems that can be accomplished
at line speed by FPGAs but more complex applications
are best described in a high-level software executing on
a processor. In this paper, we evaluate stateful network
applications with a custom multithreaded soft multiprocessor
system-on-chip—as an improvement on previous work
focusing on single-threaded off-the-shelf soft processors— to
demonstrate the features of an efficient yet usable parallel
processing system along with potential avenues to improve
on its main bottlenecks.