NPCryptBench: A Cryptographic Benchmark Suite for Network ...

NPCryptBench: A Cryptographic Benchmark Suite
for Network Processors
Yao Yue and Chuang Lin Zhangxi Tan
Department of Computer Science and Technology Department of Electrical Engineering
Tsinghua University, China and Computer Science
{yueyao, clin}@csnet1.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn University of California, Berkeley, USA
xtan@cs.berkeley.edu
Abstract—Network processors (NPs), a type of multicore, Currenthardwaresolutionslikesecuritycoprocessorsoftenfall
multithread system that exploits system on chip techniques, usu short of flexibility requirements, and they also have scalability
ally adopt a distributed, shared memory hierarchy to scale up problems with shared resources. Therefore, it is still necessary
network processing. Network applications running on NP often
to implement cryptographic processing in a software baseddisplay distinct characteristics on memory subsystem compared
manner.with traditional processors with multilevel cache. As security,
especiallycryptography,hasbecomeindispensableintoday’snet However, processing on NP has not been
works, we present a benchmark suite called NPCryptBench. It is well addressed yet. On one hand, there is little application
the first benchmark specially designed to evaluate cryptographic oriented tools and statistics. Cryptographic processing only
performance on NPs, particularly that of processor and memory
takes a small portion in known NP benchmarks [2]–[5]. Onsubsystem. By running NPCryptBench on Intel IXP network
the other hand, ...