[66502] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: PC Routers (was Re: /24s run amuck)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Vadim Antonov)
Wed Jan 14 21:28:47 2004
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2004 18:28:11 -0800 (PST)
From: Vadim Antonov <avg@kotovnik.com>
To: alex@pilosoft.com
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0401141954440.14038-100000@paix.pilosoft.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
On Wed, 14 Jan 2004 alex@pilosoft.com wrote:
> Getting to 1mpps on a single router today will probably be hard. However,
> I've been considering implementing a "clustered router" architecture,
> should scale pps more or less linearly based on number of "PCs" or
> "routing nodes" involved. I'm not sure if discussion of that is on-topic
> here, so maybe better to take it offline.
This is exactly what Pluris PC-based proof-of-concept prototype did in 97.
PCs were single-board 133MHz P-IIs, running custom forwarding code on bare
metal, yielding about 120kpps per board, or 1.9Mpps per cage.
In the production box CPU-based forwarding was replaced with ASICs, 1Gbps
hybrid optical/electrical butterfly/hypercube interconnect was replaced
with 12Gbps optical hypercube interconnect, otherwise architecture was
unchanged. That was a total overkill which was one of the reasons the
company went down.
--vadim
