Research

Current Projects

RiceNIC: A Reconfigurable and Programmable Gigabit Ethernet Card

RiceNIC is a reconfigurable and programmable Gigabit Ethernet network interface card (NIC). It is an open platform meant for research and education into network interface design. The NIC is implemented on a commercial FPGA prototyping board that includes two Xilinx FPGAs, a Gigabit Ethernet interface, a PCI interface, and both SRAM and DRAM memories. The Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGA on the board also includes two embedded PowerPC processors. RiceNIC provides significant computation and storage resources that are largely unutilized when performing the basic tasks of a network interface. The remaining processing and storage resources are available to customize the behavior of RiceNIC. This capability and flexibility makes RiceNIC a valuable platform for research and education into current and future network interface architectures.
For more information, visit: http://www.cs.rice.edu/CS/Architecture/ricenic/

Concurrent Direct Network Access (CDNA) for Virtual Machine Monitors

Virtual machine monitors (VMMs) allow multiple virtual machines running on the same physical machine to share hardware resources. To support networking, such VMMs must virtualize the machine’s network interfaces by presenting each virtual machine with a software interface that is multiplexed onto the actual physical NIC. The overhead of this software-based network virtualization severely limits network performance.

The RiceNIC was used in research with the Xen VMM that eliminated the performance limits of software multiplexing by providing each virtual machine safe direct access to the network interface. To accomplish this, network traffic multiplexing was performed directly on the RiceNIC, rather than in software on the host. This required both hardware and firmware modifications to RiceNIC. The new networking architecture is called Concurrent Direct Network Access (CDNA).
For more information on CDNA, please read the HPCA '07 publication: Concurrent Direct Network Access for Virtual Machine Monitors

Current:		Previous:
Dr. Scott Rixner (Rice University) Dr. Alan Cox (Rice University) Mike Foss (Rice University) Ian Fedeli (Rice University) Diego Ongaro (Rice University)		Dr. Hyong-youb Kim (Rice University, now at Myricom Inc.) Aravind Menon (EPFL) David Carr (Rice University)