Internet speed report...

Fri Sep 3 23:19:42 UTC 2004

At 02:51 AM 4/09/2004, Deepak Jain wrote:
>http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/03/0534206
>
>6.63 Gbps
>
>The article ended with hardware specs 'S2io's Xframe 10 GbE server 
>adapter, Cisco 7600 Series Routers, Newisys 4300 servers using AMD Opteron 
>processors, Itanium servers and the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003.'"
>
>Is there a 10GE OSM for the 7600s?

there isn't any 10GE OSM but there are certainly 10GE modules for the 
6500/7600 with deep buffers.

most recently, Guido Appenzeller, Isaac Keslassy and Nick McKeown have 
written a paper that they presented at SIGCOMM 2004 about "sizing router 
buffers" that is very informative and goes against the grain of the amount 
of buffering required in routers/switches.

for folk who aren't aware of some of the hardware limitations faced today, 
the paper provides a fairly good degree of detail on some of the technical 
tradeoffs in router/switch design and some of the technical hurdles faced 
by ever-increasing interface speeds today.

while Moore's law means that the processing speeds get faster and faster, 
the same amount of innovation cannot be said for either speed-of-RAM or 
chip packaging, which have fallen significantly behind both Moore's law and 
speed-of-interface growth curves.

cheers,

lincoln.
NB. not speaking for my employer, this is an area of research that is of 
personal interest to me.  but of course, my employer spends a lot of time 
looking at this.