Back to the Future: Towards Hardware 'Netputing' Architectures (position paper)

The last decade has witnessed an impressive paradigm shift in practically all networking fields: from hardware-based appliances to software-based infrastructures. Network functions traditionally hard-coded in the network devices have been redesigned in software and deployed in virtualized networking scenarios, with impressive advantages in terms of management flexibility and upgradable capability. Still, at a time in which we strive for more and more network processing and computing resources, such a softwarization process risks to bring about a severe toll in terms of performance and energy consumption. We believe, and posit, that programmable hardware architectures tailored for supporting high performance network processing tasks may come to the rescue. With this position paper, after motivating our position, we further briefly review the past and present of programmable hardware for networking, and we discuss its possible evolution towards more comprehensive "higher layer" HW-accelerated processing tasks.