Analysis

The central question to answer is whether the contributions as summarized achieve our stated aim. The evaluations showed that, indeed, these methods achieve significant throughput improvements for important streaming I/O applications. They also established that computers are fast enough to perform fairly complex self-configuration unnoticeably quickly. Finally, they demonstrated the feasibility of Unix(-like) pipeline offload to specialized devices, a technique that makes programmable peripheral logic more accessible. That Streamline solves a practical problem is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that other researchers continue to use it as a foundation for their networking research (7.3Example Applications) and that interest extends beyond academia: for instance, a network sensor company (NPulse) has bundled it as part of their specialized network packet capture Linux distribution.