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Home > Technology & Applications > Server Data Plane Solution for Media Applications

SigMRF - Data Plane High Capacity Media Solution


Product Status Note

Overview

SigMRF is a data plane high capacity media solution for voice and video applications. SigMRF software allows customers to turn industry standard servers into high capacity media resource servers, providing MRF (Media Resource Functions) for SBC, transcoding, and content delivery applications. Both x86 only and x86 + coCPU™ enabled platforms are supported. x86 only high capacity is based on highly optimized SigSRF shared library modules ◳. High capacity examples, including htop screen caps and CPU usage figures for 500 concurrent fully real-time sessions on a single HP 2U server, are included in SigSRF documentation ◳. For coCPU platforms, coCPU cards include 32-core and 64-core c66x PCIe accelerator cards ◳, usable with or without Intel's DPDK 1.

coCPU™ accelerator cards are thin, light weight, and have low power consumption. For example, three (3) 32-core cards can be inserted on a single riser in a 2U industry standard server and not exceed the riser power consumption limit of 150 W. A 1U server can be configured for as many as 256 c66x accelerator cores, and a 2U server for as many as 384 cores.

coCPU™ accelerator cards contain direct 1 GbE to 10 GbE network connections for high throughput and low latency media processing, including virtualized systems.

coCPU technology targets HPC applications in general, providing a low SWaP (size, weight, and power consumption) alternative to GPUs. SigMRF is a telecom focused subset of HPC applications supported by Signalogic.


HP DL380p 2U server with coCPU accelerator installed

HP DL380p 2U server with coCPU™ accelerator installed. Up to six (6) accelerators
can be installed in a 2U server with/without DPDK 1 interface

            

HP DL380p with coCPU accelerator installed

coCPU™ accelerator installed on middle riser and interfaced to
eight (8) data plane x86 cores


1 DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit) is a thin RTOS running on x86 cores separate from Linux cores wthin a server, optimized with zero-copy, fast interrupt response time, and other ultra high speed methods. DPDK provides high-throughput, low-latency access between x86 cores and high-speed I/O (such as Ethernet from 1 to 40 GbE) and PCIe I/O such as the coCPU accelerator cards. More information on DPDK is here ◳.

Media Resource Functions (MRF)

Below is a list of media resource functions:

Codecs, Wireline

Codecs, Wireless

Codecs, Wideband

Audio and Voice Functions

Telecom Functions

Media Framework Functions

Packet Processing Functions

Encryption

Capacity Figures

Below is a table giving transcoding capacity figures for a SigC6678 "quad" accelerator card with 32 cores. Some notes about the table:

CPU / Accelerator Type
SigC6678 Accelerator Voice / Video Capacity
Copyright © Signalogic 2013-2014
x86 1 coCPU 2
Number of cores             16 32
Clock rate (GHz)             3.00 1.25
Framework overhead (%)               30%
   
Codec(s)     Fps Encode, Decode,
or Both
Enc Cores3 Dec Cores3    
V
i
d
e
o
         
H.264 720p BP 1 Mbps     15 E 2 1   18
VP8 720p 1 Mbps     15 E 4 1   9
MPEG2 720p BP 4 Mbps     15 E 2     18
H.264 1080p BP 1 Mbps     15 E 2 1   18
VP8 1080p 1 Mbps     15 E 4 1   9
MPEG2 1080p BP 4 Mbps     15 E 2     18
H.264 CIF MP 500 kbps     15 E 2 1   18
H.264 QCIF MP 250 kbps     15 E 1 1   36
                   
     
S
p
e
e
c
h
G.711       B       47458
AMR-NB       B     4288
AMR-WB       B     1810
EVRC       B     2602
G.722       B     8777
G.722.1 (16 kHz Fs)       B     10566
G.723.1A       B     5773
G.729AB       B     5501
GSM FR       B     23729
GSM HR       B     3900
iLBC       B     3230
1 Intel Sandy Bridge
2 Texas Inst C66x
3 Dedicated cores required due to optimized algorithm

Multicore Hardware Supported

Several types of multicore hardware are supported for coCPU acceleration, including:

Software Architecture

The block diagram below shows a high-throughput, low latency "data plane path" (blue line) between x86 cores and data plane media processing cores. In this example, control plane processing is handled by x86 cores running Linux, and control plane related coordination follows the "control plane path" (red line). If the machine is virtualized, data plane processing -- including Ethernet I/O on the accelerator cards -- would not be visible to the VM.

DPDK + Accelerator Software Architecture
DPDK + Accelerator Software Architecture