Frame Shared Memory: Line-Rate Networking on Commodity Hardware [abstract] (ACM DL, PDF)
John Giacomoni, John K. Bennet, Antonio Carzaniga, Douglas C. Sicker, Manish Vachharajani, and Alexander L. Wolf
Proceedings of the 2007 ACM/IEEE Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communications Systems (ANCS), December 2007.

Network processors provide an economical programmable platform to handle the high throughput and frame rates of modern and next-generation communication systems. However, these platforms have exchanged general-purpose capabilities for performance.

This paper presents an alternative; a software framework for commodity general-purpose architectures capable of high-rate and throughput sequential frame processing compatible with high-level languages and general-purpose operating system. A cache-optimized concurrent lock free queue provides the low-overhead core-to-core communication necessary to sustain sequential frame processing rates beyond the 1.41~million frames per second realized on gigabit Ethernet while permitting per-frame processing time expansion with pipeline parallelism.