A Scalable Multi-FPGA Platform for Complex Networking Applications

Ballooning traffic volumes and increasing link-speeds require ever high compute power to perform complex real-time processing of network packets. FPGAs have already been successfully employed in the past to accelerate network infrastructure-operations at these line-speed processing rates. However, much of the prior work concentrated on single-FPGA platforms. To this end, we have studied how to extend an architecture for 10G application-level network processing into a scalable multi-device system. We present a ring-based approach, of which a quad-FPGA implementation will be evaluated on the BEEcube BEE3 computing platform.