@inproceedings{sultana2017emu,
author = {Sultana, Nik and Galea, Salvator and Greaves, David and Wojcik, Marcin and Shipton, Jonny and Clegg, Richard G. and Mai, Luo and Bressana, Pietro and Soule, Robert and Mortier, Richard and Costa, Paolo and Pietzuch, Peter and Crowcroft, Jon and Moore, Andrew W. and Zilberman, Noa  },
title = {Emu: Rapid Prototyping of Networking Services},
booktitle = {USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC'17)},
year = {2017},
month = {July},
abstract = {Due to their performance and flexibility, FPGAs are an attractive platform for the execution of network functions. It has been a challenge for a long time though to make FPGA programming accessible to a large audience of developers. An appealing solution is to compile code from a general-purpose language to hardware using high-level synthesis. Unfortunately, current approaches to implement rich network functionality are insufficient because they lack: (i) libraries with abstractions for common network operations and data structures, (ii) bindings to the underlying ``substrate'' on the FPGA, and (iii) debugging and profiling support.

This paper describes Emu, a new standard library for an FPGA hardware compiler that enables developers to rapidly create and deploy network functionality. Emu allows for high-performance designs without being bound to particular packet processing paradigms. Furthermore, it supports running the same programs on CPUs, in Mininet, and on FPGAs, providing a better development environment that includes advanced debugging capabilities. We demonstrate that network functions implemented using Emu have only negligible resource and performance overheads compared with natively-written hardware versions.},
publisher = {USENIX},
url = {http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/research/publication/emu-rapid-prototyping-networking-services/},
edition = {USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC'17)},
}