ANDOVER, Mass. — At INTEROP Las Vegas, Napatech announced the support of PCIe Architecture to the already successful line of 1G and 10G FPGA based high performance network adapter cards. This in combination with their TUSCON software release provides a uniform common API to all adapters both PCIx and PCIe enabling easy programming of the adapters. The interface is highly optimized for high performance (e.g. when 8 Gbps data is delivered to the application memory, less than 1% of one CPU core is used).
“Napatech’s adapter acceleration is not just one feature, but a number of different acceleration technologies that can be used in different combinations for different user scenarios. This allows our OEM customers to address applications like Flow Inspection, Lawful Intercept, Deep Packet Inspection, Protocol Classification and more. Adapter features like Packet Classification off-loads the host CPU from analyzing network frames. Dynamic Frame Offsets and 64 User-Programmable Filters with the ability to be changed on the fly enable filtering of network frames at line speed so that user applications only need to handle relevant frames. Fixed and Dynamic Slicing enables slicing of captured frames that reduces the amount of data that must be transferred to the host memory and that the user application needs to handle. 2 or 5 Tuple Hash Key Generation can be used to recognize various IP/UDP/TCP flows (e.g. NetFlow, Snort or Data Retention),” says Nick Arraje, VP of Sales at Napatech.
He adds, “PCAP, Standard and Extended Descriptor Generation enables the user to generate a broad range of descriptors that can be pre-pended to the captured frames and can integrate smoothly with LibPCAP-based applications. Multi CPU Buffer Splitting supports splitting of data in from 2 to 32 buffers, which simplifies the distribution of the processing of captured data on multiple CPU cores, improving cache hit rates, and memory bandwidth.”
“These along with other features, like high-precision time stamping (10nS) with support for 6 different formats including standard Windows, UNIX and other options (e.g. via GPS), and large on-board memory buffering (up to 2GB), are all designed to accelerate the user application and bring products to market quicker by utilizing an off-the-shelf server solution.”
“As part of the new release, Napatech has developed a Napatech Programming Language (NTPL) to simplify the setup of advanced adapter features. NTPL is a text-based interface that enables customers to develop HW independent and very portable applications by focusing on the business logic. NTPL enables Napatech to evolve and upgrade the underlying technology without the need for its OEM customers to modify their applications. NTPL is parsed by an interpreter in the driver that will automatically optimize the use of the adapter resources (e.g. Filter resources). In addition, a command line tool taking NTPL commands or command files is available which enables rapid prototyping. The NTPL interface and NTPL command line tool are supported by all Napatech adapters,” Arraje concludes.
The feature set supports Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows drivers, a programming interface and development tools.
About Napatech
Napatech is a leading OEM supplier of multi port 1Gb and multi port 10Gb high performance network adapter cards. The core idea is to off-load real-time/streaming protocols, payload analysis and control applications traditionally implemented in software or proprietary hardware. Napatech expects a huge growth in the demand for intelligent and programmable adapters as Ethernet speeds increase. Current PC architecture limits the amount of bandwidth that can be handled by the PCI bus and CPU/memory. Napatech has sales, marketing and R&D offices in Mountain View, California, Andover, Massachusetts and Copenhagen, Denmark.
For more information visit us at: http://www.napatech.com .
[tags]FPGA network adapter cards, Napatech TUSCON software, Nick Arraje[/tags]
