NetFPGA: Rapid Prototyping of Networking Devices in Open Source

The demand-led growth of datacenter networks has meant that many constituent technologies are beyond the budget of the wider community. In order to make and validate timely and relevant new contributions, the wider community requires accessible evaluation, experimentation and demonstration environments with specification comparable to the subsystems of the most massive datacenter networks. We demonstrate NetFPGA, an open-source platform for rapid prototyping of networking devices with I/O capabilities up to 100Gbps. NetFPGA offers an integrated environment that enables networking research by users from a wide range of disciplines: from hardware-centric research to formal methods.This work was jointly supported by EPSRC INTERNET Project EP/H040536/1, National Science Foundation under Grant No. CNS-0855268, and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), under contract FA8750-11-C-0249. The views, opinions, and/or findings contained in this report are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official views or policies, either expressed or implied, of the National Science Foundation, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or the Department of Defense.This is the accepted manuscript. The final version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2785956.279002