The TOFFEE Project
HOMEDOCUMENTATIONUPDATESVIDEOSRESEARCHDOWNLOADSPONSORSCONTACT


DOCUMENTATION 》 TOFFEE with Hardware Compression and Decompression Accelerator Cards

You can build a basic TOFFEE WAN Optimization hardware completely in software layer (i.e its networking data-plane and control-plane). And if you are a product manufacturer you can make commercial WAN Optimization products with TOFFEE with software layer alone. And if you choose to improve its performance, you can use any third-party PCIe Compression Accelerator cards.

Here is the TOFFEE system architecture with and without hardware accelerator card (i.e Hardware offload). Hardware offload will greatly reduce the load on general purpose CPU (which is your software/OS layer) and the core data optimization operation such as loss-less compression (sometimes even encryption) is done within a dedicated Hardware Accelerator card (or chip) as shown below.
TOFFEE Architecture with Compression and Decompression Accelerator Card

In this case TOFFEE will work as an WAN Optimization framework. With this framework you can architect your entire commercial WAN Optimization product series. You need to modify TOFFEE Linux kernel modules (and APIs) so that it no longer choose kernel's LZ77, LZO or LZ4 software compression libraries (which is CPU bound), instead point to the hardware accelerator card vendor provided kernel's driver/library APIs. This makes packet data compression within TOFFEE Linux Kernel module CPU bound to dedicated co-processor hardware compression accelerator card bound.

It is a well known fact that Linux Kernel's Kernel modules are not great at scaling with multiple CPU Processor Cores. So in a systems architecture point of having more CPU cores in a TOFFEE WAN Optimization device gives no significant advantage. The per-core CPU performance is what required for a workload like TOFFEE packet data optimization. So if architect a high-end WAN Optimization device you need to consider hardware acceleration offload if feasible.

For example: Here is a general purpose AHA AHA363PCIE0301G 5Gbs GZIP Compression/Decompression Accelerator Card. Typical applications (or use-cases) of this card could be Storage Arrays, Load Balancers, WAN Optimization, Web Servers, Data Analytics, etc.
Comtech AHA AHA363PCIE0301G 5Gbs GZIP Compression/Decompression Accelerator Card
Image courtesy/link: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61kMl1v4BmL._SL1500_.jpg



Intel FPGA PAC D5005 High-end Drop-in Accelerator: Here is yet another but general purpose FPGA Accelerator card can be used for processing high-bandwidth Network and Storage Data Processing (hardware offload). Read the complete article here.
Intel FPGA PAC D5005 On HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10
Image courtesy/link: https://www.servethehome.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Intel-FPGA-PAC-D5005-on-HPE-ProLiant-DL380-Gen10.jpg
Intel FPGA PAC D5005
Image courtesy/link: https://www.servethehome.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Intel-FPGA-PAC-D5005-Diagram.jpg


References:



Suggested Topics:


TOFFEE - WAN Optimization


Categories

💎 TOFFEE-MOCHA new bootable ISO: Download
💎 TOFFEE Data-Center Big picture and Overview: Download PDF


Recommended Topics:

WAN Optimization Network Stack Architecture - Linux Kernel vs Intel DPDK vs Custom Packet Forward ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021

WAN Optimization iPhone and Android - Mobile App ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021

CDN Hosting ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021
It is quite interesting that there are few web hosting firms are offering direct CDN based hosting services. Since it is a direct CDN based hosting, it is cheap, extremely easy or transparent CDN service. It is transparent, since each time you publish your content in the hosting web-server (origin server), it is immediately is in sync automatically in the user-serving CDN caching machines. Since the hosting vendor and the CDN vendor are all the same, it is also easy to use their services. There is no incompatibility issues, interoperability issues, and better integrated analytics, are all the benefits of CDN Hosting services.

Tracking Live Network Application Data - in a WAN Acceleration (WAN Optimization) Device ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021

CDN Content Delivery Networks - Types ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021

TOFFEE Data-Center WAN Optimization deployment in Big Data Analytics ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021

Watch on Youtube - [1888//1] Deep Space Communication - Episode1 - Introduction ↗


TOFFEE Data-Center WAN Optimization deployment in Big Data Analytics ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021

TOFFEE (and TOFFEE-DataCenter) optimized Satellite (inflight/marine/defense) ISP Networks ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021
TOFFEE Optimized Satellite ISP Network: TOFFEE/TOFFEE-DataCenter can be used to optimize Satellite Networks (Satellite based Internet Networks, VoIP, Data, private leased-links) as shown. Ground station transponders can be connected via array of TOFFEE Devices and in the remote CPE can have dedicated or inbuilt TOFFEE with which you can establish a WAN Optimized Satellite Network Tunnel as shown.

Power consumption of my Home Lab devices for research ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021
Here is my power-consumption measurements of various devices deployed within my home lab. I measured via my kill-a-watt sort of power-meter which is fairly reliable and accurate. I checked its accuracy with various standard load such as Philips LED laps and other constant power-consuming devices to make sure that the power-meter is precise.

TOFFEE-DataCenter :: Optimized ISP backbone networks for countries with slowest Internet Speed ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021



Featured Educational Video:
Watch on Youtube - [1836//1] x257 tp-link UE300 Linux Kernel Realtek Driver Codewalk rtl8153a-3 r8152 USB 3.0 to Gigabit - Part1 ↗

Setting up a WAN Emulator within VirtualBox ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021

TOFFEE-DataCenter WAN Optimization software development - Update: 19-Aug-2016 ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021
This is my next software development update of TOFFEE-DataCenter which I am working since past few weeks. I was very busy in implementing the core TOFFEE-DataCenter components along with prototyping, benchmarking, implementing and testing the same. However today is the first time ever I did a fresh new CLI interface for the upcoming new TOFFEE-DataCenter.

Network MTU research and optimization of WAN Links ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021
Network MTU research and optimization of WAN Links

TOFFEE-Mocha - WAN Emulator :: TOFFEE-MOCHA-2.0.3-0-10-nov-2018-x86-64.iso ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021
Download TOFFEE-MOCHA-2.0.3-0-10-nov-2018-x86-64.iso via Google Drive share: Live bootable x86-64 Debian Stretch 9.5 with light-weight LXDE UI ISO (includes source-code): TOFFEE-MOCHA-2.0.3-0-10-nov-2018-x86-64.iso You can find the source tar-ball in the /root folder. To know more about the project kindly refer TOFFEE- Mocha: News and Updates - Documentation. To know more about current specific release, objectives, features, release notes/updates, quick demo and future road-map, you can watch my video below.



Watch on Youtube - [466//1] 158 VLOG - TOFFEE WAN Optimization Software Development live update - 6-Nov-2016 ↗

TOFFEE-DataCenter WAN Optimization software development - Update: 13-Aug-2016 ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021
Earlier the TOFFEE is intended to work on IoT devices, Satellite Networks, branch office/SOHO deployments. In most cases the users may deploy just one or couple of TOFFEE devices per site. But in the case of TOFFEE-DataCenter, users can scale-up deploying the same in multiple servers in a sort of distributed cluster computing scenario. Besides the core TOFFEE-DataCenter components (such as packet processing engine/framework), I need to do lot of changes in its Graphical User Interface (GUI) too to address these new requirements.



Research :: Optimization of network data (WAN Optimization) at various levels:
Network File level network data WAN Optimization


Learn Linux Systems Software and Kernel Programming:
Linux, Kernel, Networking and Systems-Software online classes [CDN]


Hardware Compression and Decompression Accelerator Cards:
TOFFEE Architecture with Compression and Decompression Accelerator Card


TOFFEE-DataCenter on a Dell Server - Intel Xeon E5645 CPU:
TOFFEE-DataCenter screenshots on a Dual CPU - Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5645 @ 2.40GHz - Dell Server