[103373] in North American Network Operators' Group
RE: 10GE router resource
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (michael.dillon@bt.com)
Wed Mar 26 19:33:02 2008
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2008 23:27:55 -0000
In-Reply-To: <3c3e3fca0803261406o38463733t8ef863c7007c0fed@mail.gmail.com>
From: <michael.dillon@bt.com>
To: <nanog@merit.edu>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
> High-rate routers try to keep the packets in an SRAM queue=20
> and instead of looking up destinations in a DRAM-based radix=20
> tree, they use a special memory device called a TCAM.
FPGAs can be used to do both SRAM and TCAMs. All that is needed
is an FPGA board with 10G or a 10G card with an FPGA on it.
Although NetFPGA and RiceNIC are both 1G devices, there is a
certain commercial market for programmable high-speed network cards
for things like Intrusion Detection and data-center/GRID type
applications.=20
Anyone seriously interested in this area should start hunting amongst
the developers (and researchers) of embedded systems. You might end
up working with a university student in the Czech Republic to put his
TCAM/FPGA implementation onto a 10G card because the Internet breaks
down the barriers that high-margin vendors have used to create lock-in.
Bleeding edge networks may not be able to do this type of deal
but then, they are only 1% or less of the network operators out there.
--Michael Dillon
