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Software-based sequential service chains in Network Function Virtualization (NFV) could introduce significant performance overhead. Current acceleration efforts for NFV mainly target on optimizing each component of the sequential service chain. However, based on the statistics from real world enterprise networks, we observe that 53.8% network function (NF) pairs can work in parallel. In particular, 41.5% NF pairs can be parallelized without causing extra resource overhead. In this paper, we present NFP, a high performance framework, that innovatively enables network function parallelism to improve NFV performance. NFP consists of three logical components. First, NFP provides a policy specification scheme for operators to intuitively describe sequential or parallel NF chaining intents. Second, NFP orchestrator intelligently identifies NF dependency and automatically compiles the policies into high performance …