e.² SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT COST An interesting case (although not a very useful application from an everyday-life standpoint) is a benchmark test that Purdue University Professor Douglas E. Comer has documented in the web site that accompanies his network-processing book.3 He calls the application "bump-in-the-wire." It is essentially a program that looks at incoming packet traffic, detects packets addressed to port 80 by properly parsing and classifying them, and then simply counts the number of packets that are addressed to port 80. On his book's web site, Prof. Comer provides a mix of classical C code and assembly for the Intel IXP1200 NPU platform. The web site also supplies other submissions that describe Agere's imple- mentation of the same application using FPL code. The numbers are quite telling. The Intel-based C-and-assembly language implementation requires 1,491 noncommented (counted using the NCSL tool) lines of source, whereas the Agere FPL approach was implemented in 46 lines of code. Counting lines of source code can often be an inaccurate task, SO make sure oranges are compared with oranges. The same software engineering tool (NCSL) must be used. It does not take a rocket scientist to see 2. For more information, refer to the work covering this aspect in the white paper from Agere Systems "Network Processors Programming Models and Languages" written by Robert Munoz in 2002. The book we are referring to is Network Systems Design Using Network Processors by Douglas E. Comer (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 2002). The author's web site with the comparative application source code can be found at www.npbook.cs.purdue.edu/code.html. Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. SYSTEMS ENGINEERING ISSUES SYSTEMS ENGINEERING ISSUES that a flagrant ratio of 1:30 in lines of code needed for an application written by tw