400G forwarding - how does it work?

Mon Jul 25 13:16:42 UTC 2022

I'm not sure what your specific question is. So I answer my question instead.

Q: how can we do lookup fast enough to do 'big number' per second,
while underlying hardware inherently takes longer
A: we throw memory at the problem

I.e. say JNPR Trio PPE has many threads, and only one thread is
running, rest of the threads are waiting for answers from memory. That
is, once we start pushing packets through the device, it takes a long
ass time (like single digit microseconds) before we see any packets
out. 1000x longer than your calculated single digit nanoseconds.

On Mon, 25 Jul 2022 at 15:56, James Bensley <jwbensley+nanog at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi All,
>
> I've been trying to understand how forwarding at 400G is possible,
> specifically in this example, in relation to the Broadcom J2 chips,
> but I don't the mystery is anything specific to them...
>
> According to the Broadcom Jericho2 BCM88690 data sheet it provides
> 4.8Tbps of traffic processing and supports packet forwarding at 2Bpps.
> According to my maths that means it requires packet sizes of 300Bs to
> reach line rate across all ports. The data sheet says packet sizes
> above 284B, so I guess this is excluding some headers like the
> inter-frame gap and CRC (nothing after the PHY/MAC needs to know about
> them if the CRC is valid)? As I interpret the data sheet, J2 should
> supports chassis with 12x 400Gbps ports at line rate with 284B packets
> then.
>
> Jericho2 can be linked to a BCM16K for expanded packet forwarding
> tables and lookup processing (i.e. to hold the full global routing
> table, in such a case, forwarding lookups are offloaded to the
> BCM16K). The BCM16K documentation suggests that it uses TCAM for exact
> matching (e.g.,for ACLs) in something called the "Database Array"
> (with 2M 40b entries?), and SRAM for LPM (e.g., IP lookups) in
> something called the "User Data Array" (with 16M 32b entries?).
>
> A BCM16K supports 16 parallel searches, which means that each of the
> 12x 400G ports on a Jericho2 could perform an forwarding lookup at
> same time. This means that the BCM16K "only" needs to perform
> forwarding look-ups at a linear rate of 1x 400Gbps, not 4.8Tbps, and
> "only" for packets larger than 284 bytes, because that is the Jericho2
> line-rate Pps rate. This means that each of the 16 parallel searches
> in the BCM16K, they need to support a rate of 164Mpps (164,473,684) to
> reach 400Gbps. This is much more in the realm of feasible, but still
> pretty extreme...
>
> 1 second / 164473684 packets = 1 packet every 6.08 nanoseconds, which
> is within the access time of TCAM and SRAM but this needs to include
> some computing time too e.g. generating a key for a lookup and passing
> the results along the pipeline etc. The BCM16K has a clock speed of
> 1Ghz (1,000,000,000, cycles per second, or cycle every 1 nano second)
> and supports an SRAM memory access in a single clock cycle (according
> to the data sheet). If one cycle is required for an SRAM lookup, the
> BCM16K only has 5 cycles to perform other computation tasks, and the
> J2 chip needs to do the various header re-writes and various counter
> updates etc., so how is magic this happening?!?
>
> The obvious answer is that it's not magic and my understanding is
> fundamentally flawed, so please enlighten me.
>
> Cheers,
> James.

-- 
  ++ytti