Parallel and Distributed Systems Fujitsu Laboratory, RWCP

What's New 

RWCP-Fujitsu 

Comet Project 

Comet Stream Processor 

Comet Network Processor 

Comet VIA 

Comet DV/IP 

SOCKS64 

Achievements 

Papers 

Related Links 

Members 

Contact

We exhibited the Comet DV/IPsec (Digital Video over IP security) and the Comet cluster at RWC2001 Final Exhibition & Symposia, Tokyo Fashion Town, October 3 - 5, 2001.   

The Comet DV/IPsec is the first DV transmission system using IPsec in the world. Processing to encapsulate 25 Mbps DV data using IPsec ESP (Encapsulating Security Payload) packets is totally performed by a Comet Network Processor (Comet NP). Comet NP includes two Stream Processors (SPs) and each SP realizes over 250Mbps IPsec ESP processing performance. So one sp can handle total DV/IPsec processing.   

The Comet cluster is an Internet-based SCore cluster prototype. It consists of 16 dual 1GHz Pentium III PCs connected by dual-port gigabit ethernet. The cluster uses a SCore 4.1 parallel and distributed operating system developed by Parallel and Distributed System Software Laboratory. We demonstrated a volume rendering program and a NAS parallel benchmark program running on the cluster.   

Some snapshots are available.   

We exhibited the Comet network adapter at NETWORLD+INTEROP 2001 TOKYO IPv6 ShowCase. Some snapshots are available.   

An article of Nikkei Internet Technology  

An article of our Comet networking server adapter appeard at Nikkei net/IT web site (June 2001).   

News: New Comet adapter has come.  

We developed new Comet Network Adapters on June 5, 2001. These new boards mount a Comet Network Processor (NP/ASIC) with 64bit/66MHz PCI interfaces. Currently we are testing some basic hardware functions. We will evaluate performance of the boards on various unix operating systems, such as Linux Redhat, Solaris and BSD/OS.   

News: Comet Network Processor has released.  

We developed Comet Network Processors (NP/ASIC) on January 18, 2001. The processors have unique processing engines named Stream Processor (SP) and two 64bit/66MHz PCI interfaces. Each SP has a programmable finite state machine and it treats packet data as instructions. The SP also has some functional blocks like a table lookup engine and a DES/3DES engine. Using 0.35um low-cost CMOS technology, each SP works at 55MHz and achieves 440MB/sec IP processing speed. Moreover, using the 3DES engine, it will achieve 22MB/sec throughput for IPsec communication.   

SC2000 research exhibit of IP/OC48c Cluster System  

We exhibited Comet IP/OC48c(2.5Gbps) clustering technology in Dallas at Super Computing 2000. This cluster consists of four PCs which mount the Comet network adapters connected to OC48c POS switch. This Comet network adapter has the Comet NP/FPGA chip and mounts a PMC standard OC48c network interface. The key technology is "on-the-fly" processing of IP packets. The Comet network adapter performs packet processing while the packet is in the state of DMA. Compared with traditional I2O network adapters with CPU, there is an advantage that our method shortens the time which IP packets are sent to and received from the network. Using PM/Comet and SCore-D software, we demonstrate some parallel applications such as NAS Parallel Benchmark and Ratracing CG software on this cluster. We also show the networking performance of PM, UDP/IP and TCP/IP protocol. At last, we have achieved TCP/IP processing performance is over 90MB/sec.   

• Brochure for SC2000 (PDF)  
• Networking performance (PDF)  
• Comet prototype network adapter  
Comet Stream Processor/FPGA  
We have aimed to manufacture the stream processor by the ASIC technology, which does the protocol processing at very high speed. This time, we developed the sream processor card equipped with FPGA chip (Xilinx XCV1000) and DES engine chip (Fujitsu CG61394). FPGA chip is equipped for the purpose of the increase of the circuit scale and the operation speed improvement which can be made for trial purposes. Moreover, DES engine chip was installed on this caed for the speed up of the security function (IPSec) on the internet. It is known that this technology is considerably heavy processing, while it is indispensable function on the internet, and it is expected to treat with hardware. We confirmed to have the processing performance of 22MByte per second in the IPSec communication as a result of this evaluation. The next generation Comet NP/ASIC will be capable of the processing performance of 88MByte per second.   


Comet -Compact PCI-  

We released a Comet board which meets standards of Compact PCI. Currently, we put the electricity supply on this, and checked the basic works with some checking programs. For complete experiments, we are running DV/IP software program with some networking cards mounted on this board.   


The OPERA "LIFE"  

Comet prototype was used in the opera of Ryuichi Sakamoto, 'LIFE'. 'LIFE' played on Sep 4-5 in Osaka, and Sep 9-12 in Tokyo, New York, and Frankfurt through high-speed internet. Our Comet Prototype has enabled such stable high-speed processing. Comet prototype supported for the digital video over internet protocol.   
Links:   

• LIFE Ryuichi Sakamoto Page  
• LIFE Ryuichi Sakamoto Tech Staffs  
• RWCP Home Page
• RWCP Press Release Page(In Japanese)
• LIFE Staff page (Password Required)

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Comet Project  

The Comet (Communication Enterprising Technology) project aims to realize the Gigabit Internet. In this project, We are improving the IP processing scheme and the interface between a host and a network adapter by offloading the IP processing from the OS to the adapter. We regard that the Gigabit Internet technologies are necessary to construct cluster computer systems for building wide, campus wide and world wide scale.  

What is the problem? In the conventional computer systems, IP is processed in an operating system where the OS manages communication requests from user processes. It has significant drawback to its communication performance.  
We consider that there are two key issues to realize the Gigabit Internet:

• Decreasing the IP protocol processing overhead. 
• Reducing the interface overhead between a host computer and a network adapter.

Gigabit Internet Technology 

We are developing the Comet network adapter with the 64 bit PCI and a hard-wired protocol processing engine on an FPGA and a new IP API which is based on the Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA).  
Several Comet network adapters have been distributed to the WIDE Project researchers as a common research platform.

Comet Network Adapter 

Comet network adapter is a standard PCI full size I₂O architecture board on which two PMC standard network interface cards can be mounted. It supports various PMC network interface cards. ATM OC3, Fast Ethernet, IEEE1394 and Gigabit Ethernet are available now.  
Performance The packet processing overhead is 40 us, i.e. 100 MB/s with 500B packet in case of 64 bit/66 MHz PCI. We will make an ASIC version of protocol processing engine in 2000. We estimate that the performance will be 10 times faster than that of the current implementation.