Summer Lake

Introduction

"Summer Lake" is a joint research and development project of Intel and the IDA with the focus on network elements. The goal of this project is to develop a programmable architecure to process WAN protocols, which are traditionally implemented in fixed hardware. Flexibilty, reduced time to market and cost reduction by reusing standard building blocks will be the benefits of a programmable architecure.

Stream-Processing in Optical Networking

Processing stream-based communication protocols means meeting hard real-time constraints while guaranteeing very high throughput. Todays typical broadband networking elements operate between 2.5 Gbps (OC-48) and 10 Gbps (OC-192). But even this is not the bleeding edge, devices running at up to 40 Gbps (OC-768) are deployed today by leading telcos.

Programmable Architecures

Meeting requirements for bleeding edge applications calls for higly specialized processors that employ multiple strategies to cope with the workload. Common among the different architectures are the use of parallellism in execution and a specialized memory structure. On a network processor chances are that you'll find

• chip multiprocessing (a chip has multiple processors) along with
• processor multithreading (a processor supports multiple threads thus hiding memory latency) and
• a non-uniform memory architecture (different execution units have different views of the memory).

A good overview of a high-performance programmable network processor is given in intel Technology Journal Vol 6 Issue 3 [external link - checked 2007-04-20]. For a "cross section" of the network processor landscape in 2003 read Niraj's excellent master thesis on network processors [external link - checked 2007-04-20].

References

• A nice (though a little dated) read on the future of SONET [external link - checked 2007-04-20]
• and some information how this is linked to known standards like Ethernet [external link - checked 2007-04-20]
• This german article sheds some light on current developments in metropolitan-area-networks [external link - checked 2007-04-20]
• Have a glimpse at intel's products for optical networks [external link - checked 2007-04-20]
• and especially products which intel Braunschweig is involved with [external link - checked 2007-04-20]
• A 3sat science show [external link - checked 2007-04-20] which covered our Institute's work

SDH Tutorials

• We found this online course by IEC [external link - checked 2007-04-20] to be an good introductory to get an technical overview of the SDH/SONET standard itself.

Emerging Standards

• GFP implementation tradeoffs in MANs [external link - checked 2007-04-20]

Summer Lake, Oregon

If you're looking for the place this project borrowed it's name from, visit all-oregon.com [external link - checked 2007-04-20].