[October 31, 2008] Express Logic's NetX TCP/IP Stack Gets 8.5 Gbps in Sony Multicore Network Throughput Benchmarks Tweet Express Logic, a provider of royalty-free real-time operating systems (RTOS), announced the results achieved by Sony engineers using Express Logic's NetX TCP/IP network stack and ThreadX RTOS. The paper, "Network Processing on an SPE Core in Cell Broadband Engine," presented at the IEEE Symposium on High Performance Interconnects reports that Express Logic's NetX and ThreadX RTOS achieved near-wire speeds reaching 8.5 Gbps, surpassing what they were able to achieve using Linux, the company said. The Cell Broadband Engine is a multicore system on a chip developed by Sony, IBM and Toshiba. It is composed of a Power Processing Element (PPE), which is a processor core with a PowerPC instruction set architecture and eight Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs). The SPEs are SIMD instruction set processors with 256-KB of local storage (LS). With a clock speed of 3.2 GHz, the Cell Broadband Engine has a theoretical peak computational performance of 230.4 GFlop/s (single-precision floating point), according to the company. Sony's engineers said they considered using Linux for their TCP/IP transfers. But Linux standard protocol stacks have large memory footprints that exceed the 256KB SPE memory size. Sony engineers had to make extensive modifications to port to the SPE, and they found that even the full processing power of the PPE was insufficient to attain the maximum bandwidth on a 10-Gbps Ethernet. They opted therefore to use a protocol stack designed for embedded applications-Express Logic's NetX running on the ThreadX RTOS. NetX, a small, fast, commercial real-time TCP/IP stack, supports fast UDP and TCP transfers, yet at under 30KB, it fits well within the 256KB confines of SPE local memory. As Sony's engineers reported in the paper, "We implemented a network protocol stack on one of these SPEs. On this single SPE, we operated the protocol stack NetX, developed for embedded applications, and the microkernel ThreadX required for its operation. Both were manufactured by Express Logic. In addition there are communication interfaces enabling the protocol-stack-driven SPE to be accessed from device drivers and other processors. As a result, we achieved a TCP performance of 8.5 Gbps for 3-KB packet sizes using a single SPE operating at 3.2 GHz. This result indicates a competitive network protocol processing performance, considering that we employed a processor designed for a variety of computational applications rather than a dedicated network processor, and demonstrates the potential of the application of SPEs in this field." "We are thrilled that Sony's engineers elected to use our NetX TCP/IP stack and our ThreadX RTOS in this research project," said William E. Lamie, president of Express Logic. "But even more satisfying is the outstanding performance. This underscores the efficiency of NetX and its potential for demanding networking applications, such as Internet gaming and home entertainment." ((Comments on this story may be sent to [email protected])) ((Distributed via M2 Communications Ltd - http://www.m2.com)) http://www.10meters.com Comments on this story may be sent to [email protected] [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]