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