Summary
Falling somewhere between pure software solutions like Click and completely custom hardware, NetFPGA gives students and researches a programmable hardware platform for designing network software. This allows users to actually interact with the hardware and deal with any associated issues, without actually having to build the hardware itself.
Users program the NetFPGA remotely by uploading programs which they can then send data to and receive data from. The devices can also be linked into the Stanford network so they can carry real data. Using this platform students have built an IP routers, making it clearly a good learning tool. However, to enable more complex research the new version has an on-board CPU, (the previous version did not, and was controlled by sending special packets from a remote controller) which is being used, for example, to write a 'shunt' that allows low cost intrusion detection by only offloading packets to the detector that really need to be examined.
Comments
There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of downside to this project. I do wonder what performance is like compared to a custom hardware router and Click, but this doesn't seem like a huge issue on a research platform.
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