[svlug] ACCU Wednesday 'packetC for Network Applications' Ralph Duncan

[Walter Vannini]

When:      Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Topic:     packetC for Network Applications
Speaker:   Ralph Duncan
Time:      6:30pm doors open
         7:00pm meeting begins
Where:     Symantec
         VCAFE building
         350 Ellis Street (near E. Middlefield Road)
         Mountain View, CA 94043
Map:       <http://tinyurl.com/334rv5>
Directions: VCAFE is accessible from the semicircular courtyard between Symantec buildings <http://tinyurl.com/2dccgc>
Cost:      Free
More Info: <http://www.accu-usa.org>

Network application developers often meet performance demands by using C-language variants that expose NPU-specific details.  This fine-grained control of tasks and machine resources delivers optimizations but can also result in very complex, hard-to-port code.

CloudShield Technologies <http://www.cloudshield.com/> is exploring a different approach with its packetC language.  packetC uses a coarse-grain model of packet parallelism and hides processor-specific features.  Its most distinctive features are new data types and operators for classic packet-processing. This talk provides an overview of packetC and its application environment.  It describes two of its most unusual data types in detail.

Ralph Duncan is one of packetC's three designers.  He worked on Navy Ada compilers for Control Data and researched parallel processing technologies for the Air Force.  More recently, he ported C compilers and served on the IEEE P-1800 committee for interfaces between systemVerilog and C.  He is the packetC compiler project lead for CloudShield.

Meetings are open to the public and are free of charge.

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The ACCU meets monthly. Meetings are always open to the public and are free of charge. To suggest topics and speakers please email Walter Vannini via walterv at gbbservices.com