SimNP: A Flexible Platform for the Simulation of Network Processing Systems

Network processing plays an important role in the development of Internet as more and more complicated applications are deployed throughout the network. With the advent of new platforms such as network processors (NPs) that incorporate novel architectures to speedup packet processing, there is an increasing need for an efficient method to facilitate the study of their performance. In this paper, we present a tool called SimNP, which provides a flexible platform for the simulation of a network processing system in order to provide information for workload characterization, architecture development, and application implementation. The simulator models several architectural features that are commonly employed by NPs, including multiple processing engines (PEs), integrated network interface and memory controller, and hardware accelerators. ARM instruction set is emulated and a simple memory model is provided so that applications implemented in high level programming language such as C can be easily compiled into an executable binary using a common compiler like gcc. Moreover, new features or new modules can also be easily added into this simulator. Experiments have shown that our simulator provides abundant information for the study of network processing systems.