Fine-grained pipeline parallelization for network function programs

ABSTRACTNetwork programming languages enable programmers to implement new network functions on various hardware and software stacks in the domain of Software Defined Networking (SDN). Although the languages extend the flexibility of network devices, existing compilers do not fully optimize the network programs due to their coarse-grained parallelization methods. The compilers consider each packet processing table that consists of match and action functions as a unit of tasks and parallelize the programs without decomposing match and action functions. This work proposes a new fine-grained pipeline parallelization compiler for network programming languages, named PSDN. First, the PSDN compiler decouples match and action functions from packet processing tables and analyzes dependencies among the matches and actions. While respecting the dependencies, the compiler efficiently schedules each match and action function into a pipeline with clock cycle estimation and fuses functions to reduce synchronization overheads. This work implements the PSDN compiler that translates a P4 network program to a Xilinx PX program, which is synthesizable to NetFPGA-SUME hardware. The proposed compiler reduces packet processing latency by 12.1% and utilization by 3.5% compared to previous work.