Possible research projects on Octeon.

1.

More popular of the Internet, more security issues are concerned for the Internet connections. Nowadays, VPN is becoming a very popular method to secure connections on the Internet. By a VPN connection, both terminals can exchange data in a secured tunnel which keeps data integrity and confidentiality. However, establishing a VPN connection costs much CPU process time and many hardware resources. Part of CPU and memory are occupied by encryption and decryption process. Therefore, a dedicate processor to execute decryption/encryption will save much CPU process time and many other hardware resources.Cavium Networks present a series of hardware based on MIPS processor, called Octeon, which provides coprocessor to process decryption/encryption work for faster execution.An open source VPN software Openswan on Octeon can be modified to replace its VPN decryption/encryption functions by hardware accelerator. The accuracy and performance of encryption and decryption processes are validated by comparing hardware and software solutions.

2.

In this century, most data are stored in computers. With the increasing of data, the frequency of using computer to process data is growing much more than before. Therefore, decreasing data capacity is becoming one of the most important issues to reduce cost.During these years, SATA disk is the most cost effective solution to provide storage capacity. However, Cavium Octeon is an embedded system, which is no SATA disk installed. An analysis of Linux Kernel for installing SATA disk is presented for better storage capacity before data compression.There are two ways for data compression, loss compression and lossless compression. Loss compression is usually utilized in image, video and audio processing, as well as lossless compression is usually used for text compression or the environment of low fault-tolerant compression. Cavium Octeon provides a hardware lossless compression solution called zip Coprocessor which is implemented in this research.After the implementation, data compressed by zip Coprocessor can be decompressed by gzip, and the result is same vice versa.