An Accurate Learning-Based Performance/Power Model for System-Level Design of a Multicore Multithreaded Network Processor

In the network applications domain, different network environments and scenarios demand various line rates, and restrain the design of the network processor by several constraints such as power and area. Additionally, new network services and applications with different processing requirements are increasingly emerging day by day. In this regard, having a multi-objective and flexible performance model that can be used to minimize the cost and time of designing network processors is an inevitable need. In this paper, we propose an accurate and fast prediction model that exploits just a few numbers of system-level parameters to estimate the performance and power of a commercial network processor, Intel IXP2800. The proposed design methodology uses a non-linear learning algorithm - a combination of the polynomial transformation of design parameters and higher-order spline functions - which in the face of newly introduced applications needs only a small training set, i.e. a small number of simulations, to train the model. Our experimental results show the proposed models can achieve a median error rate as low as 8.7 percent for performance and 2.6 percent for power metric.