FAST: Enabling Fast Software/Hardware Prototype for Network Experimentation

The evolution of new technologies in network community is getting ever faster. Yet it remains the case that prototyping those novel mechanisms on a real-world system (i.e. CPU-FPGA platforms) is both time and labor consuming, which has a serious impact on the research timeliness. In order to bring researchers out of trivial process in prototype development, this paper proposed FAST, a software hardware co-design framework for fast network prototyping. With the programming abstraction of FAST, researchers are able to prototype (using C, verilog or both) a wide spectrum of network boxes rapidly based on all kinds of CPU-FPGA platforms. FAST framework takes care of managing DMA, PCIe and Linux Kernel while providing a unified API for researchers so they can focus only on the packet processing functions. We demonstrate FAST framework's easy to use features with a number of prototypes and show we can get over 10x gains in performance or 1000x better accuracy in clock synchronization compared with their software versions.