SCAMPI - Programmable hardware for network monitoring - by Jiri Novotny, Masaryk University (CZ)
8 June 2004, 16.00-17.30
SCAMPI is a two-and-a-half-year European project to develop a scalable monitoring platform for the Internet. The project has several objectives including the development of a new monitoring API that will make it easier to develop monitoring applications, developing new monitoring applications that demonstrates the usefulness of the new API and also to develop a hardware adapter capable of doing passive monitoring at speeds of 10Gb/s.
Passive monitoring of high-speed networks using of PC computers requires specialized monitoring hardware to eliminate bottleneck of PCI bus and host computer resources. Hardware design and development is compared to the software development long-time and expensive process. Thanks to the maturity of programmable hardware (especially FPGA) which offers a large amount of fast logic we are able to build flexible and powerful hardware which can be used for network monitoring. A family of COMBO cards based on XILINX FPGA (Virtex II and VIRTEX II PRO) and their using for network monitoring on 1Gb/s and 10Gb/s speeds were discussed.
Slides from the conference.