PacketShader

Mon Aug 23 18:56:29 UTC 2010

> Date: Mon, 23 Aug 2010 06:27:00 -0700
> From: Jim Shankland <nanog at shankland.org>
> 
> Mark Smith wrote:
> > On Mon, 23 Aug 2010 05:59:43 -0400
> > Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu wrote:
> > 
> > I missed that, and that answers the "was it a GigaBytes verses Gigabits
> > error" question. Nothing new here by the looks of it - people in this
> > thread were getting those sorts of speeds a year ago out of PC hardware
> > under Linux -
> > 
> > http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/7/15/234
> > 
> > "I have achieved a collective throughput of 66.25 Gbit/s."
> > 
> > "We've achieved 70 Gbps aggregate unidirectional TCP performance from
> > one P6T6 based system to another."
> 
> Very nice, but doing this with 1514-byte packets is the low-hanging
> fruit.  (9K packets?  That's the fruit that falls off the tree and
> into your basket while you're napping :-).)  The more interesting limit:
> how many 40-byte packets per second can you shovel into this system
> and still have all of them come out the other end?

Seems reasonable, but in our testing of 100G Ethernet capable routers we
found one that handled 8000 bytes just fine, but could only run 9000
byte packets at about 90G. Just a bit unexpected.

Really, in this day and age, a chassis throughput of 100G is pretty
trivial. When you start getting up to the Tbps range on a system using
"standard components", then I'll be really interested. 

We do have a network of many end systems attached with 10Gbps Ethernet
cards. I'm sure that we are not unique, though probably unusual.  We are
achieving stable disk to disk transfer rates of well over 3G between the
US and Australia. I don't think that PacketShader would handle the
load too well.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634
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