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.