System and method for multicore communication processing

• Main Authors: THEMANN, JAN-BERND, CALVIGNAC, JEAN L, VERPLANKEN, FABRICE J, BASSO, CLAUDE, DIERKS, HERMAN D. JR, VERRILLI, COLIN B, CHANG, CHIH-JEN, VAIDHYANATHAN, NATARAJAN, RAISCH, CHRISTOPH, DAMON, PHILIPPE
• Format: Patent
• Language: Chinese; English
• Published: 01.12.2008
• Subjects: ELECTRIC COMMUNICATION TECHNIQUE; ELECTRICITY; TRANSMISSION OF DIGITAL INFORMATION, e.g. TELEGRAPHICCOMMUNICATION

A system and method for multicore processing of communications between data processing devices are provided. With the mechanisms of the illustrative embodiments, a set of techniques that enables sustaining media speed by distributing transmit and receive-side processing over multiple processing cores is provided. In addition, these techniques also enable designing multi-threaded network interface controller (NIC) hardware that efficiently hides the latency of direct memory access (DMA) operations associated with data packet transfers over an input/output (I/O) bus. Multiple processing cores may operate concurrently using separate instances of a communication protocol stack and device drivers to process data packets for transmission with separate hardware implemented send queue managers in a network adapter processing these data packets for transmission. Multiple hardware receive packet processors in the network adapter may be used, along with a flow classification engine, to route received data packets to app