Accelerated Wire-Speed Packet Capture at 200 Gbps

We present our latest FPGA acceleration card NFB-200G2QL that is specifically designed to enable traffic processing at 200 Gbps. Unique high-speed DMA engines in the FPGA together with highly optimized Linux drivers enable data transfer through PCIe interfaces with minimal CPU overhead. Captured traffic can be independently distributed between individual cores of two physical CPUs (NUMA nodes) without utilization of QPI. As a result, wire-speed packet capture to the host memory from two fully saturated 100 Gbps Ethernet interfaces (QSFP28+ cages) is achieved and various network monitoring applications can utilize the power of the latest FPGAs and CPUs for data processing. This is especially useful when both directions of a single 100GbE link are monitored. The live demonstration shows how the packets are received from two 100 Gbps Ethernet links at wire-speed and captured to the host memory at 200 Gbps without a loss. The opposite direction of communication is also shown, i.e. how the packets are transmitted from the host memory and fully saturate the two 100GbE network interfaces. Achieved speeds are demonstrated by counters and gauges showing generated, received/transmitted and captured packets. We also show statistics of CPU load during the packet capture/transmission for different packet lengths.