INVEA-TECH presenting NetCOPE for NetFPGA: Industrial quality gateware for NetFPGA-10G cards

Aug. 31, 2011 - PRLog -- Accelerated Network Technologies research group (ANT@FIT) together with INVEA-TECH worked to prepare the new NetCOPE for NetFPGA-10G. All the necessary modifications of NetCOPE platform as well as results of the performance measurements are presented in a poster abstract that was accepted to the upcoming conference ANCS 2011 under title: Hacking NetCOPE to run on NetFPGA-10G.
The NetCOPE for NetFPGA is now available and INVEA-TECH has special academic offer including free demo. For more information about the NetCOPE platform as well as the free demo, please, visit www.invea-tech.com/products-and-services/netcope-fpga-platform.
The NetFPGA-10G board was designed by the NetFPGA team at Stanford University. NetFPGA-10G is a line-rate, flexible, and open platform for research, and classroom experimentation. It has 4 x 10GigE SFP+ interfaces, a PCI Express interface to the host, and a Xilinx Virtex-5 TX240T FPGA. The board has SRAM and DRAM (27 MBytes QDRII SRAM, 288 MBytes RLDRAM-II) and a high bandwidth expansion connector for daughter-cards.
The NetCOPE is a high performance scalable platform for rapid development of FPGA applications. The NetCOPE platform provides comprehensive FPGA design framework, which integrates hardware building blocks (network, PCI blocks), Linux device drivers, system libraries, command line tools, sample codes and tutorials. Further, the NetCOPE provides generic interface to the user's application core. With time-consuming  performance, functional, and timing pattern issues resolved, designers can focus on the application core - prototype and develop novel protocols and products. The NetCOPE was originally designed to be used with COMBO cards.
The COMBO cards are  networking cards with programmable processing chip developed at CESNET's research project Liberouter. CESNET is a Czech Republic national research and educational network provider. The latest family of COMBOv2 cards offer multiple choices of network interfaces ranging from 1G SFP to 10G SFP+ connectors as well as FPGA processing elements ranging from Virtex-5 LX155T to Virtex-5 TX240T FPGAs. Further, it is possible to utilize of-chip QDRII and DDR2 memories and benefit from other unique features of the cards, eg. on the fly PCI-Express card reboot that saves developer's time and makes COMBO cards industrial quality alternative to NetFPGA cards.

About ANT@FIT:
Accelerated Network Technologies (ANT@FIT) research group was formed in September 2009 by group of researches and PhD students at Faculty of Information Technology , Brno University of Technology. The research group deals with acceleration of time critical operations, which are used in devices for network infrastructure or devices for network monitoring and security. For more information visit merlin.fit.vutbr.cz/ant/.

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INVEA-TECH develops and markets comprehensive network solutions for networks from 10 Mbps to 100 Gbps. The core idea is to provide complete range of products and services for network security, network monitoring, traffic analysis & hardware acceleration.