PC Routers (was Re: /24s run amuck)

Thu Jan 15 02:28:11 UTC 2004

On Wed, 14 Jan 2004 alex at 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