Pensando Distributed Services Architecture

Michael Galles, Francis Matus

2021IEEE Micro10 citationsDOI

Abstract

The Pensando distributed services architecture is designed to provide programmable security, network, storage, and visibility services to a data center landscape growing in scale and complexity. This domain-specific architecture combines P4 packet processing pipelines with embedded ARM CPUs and hardware offload engines in a tightly coupled, cache coherent interconnect. Millions of flows are tracked by hardware and distributed to a combination of P4 programs, ARM processes, custom hardware engines, and PCIe based hosts and devices. There are currently 16- and 7-nm ASIC implementations of this distributed services architecture, future generations are in design.

Topics & Concepts

Computer scienceApplication-specific integrated circuitArchitectureEmbedded systemPCI ExpressComputer architectureDistributed System Security ArchitectureOperating systemField-programmable gate arrayCloud computingCloud computing securitySecurity information and event managementVisual artsArtSoftware-Defined Networks and 5GCloud Computing and Resource ManagementNetwork Security and Intrusion Detection