[Bloat] netfpga SUMA design contest

Dave Taht dave.taht at gmail.com
Thu Jan 26 19:28:56 EST 2017


Cambridge is doing a challenge to get the fastest possible switch
design for their netfpga hardware.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netfpga/challenge2017/

Their basic proposed test suite is pretty bare-bones and doesn't touch
upon the congestion issue, really. Just forwarding behaviors. Two+
ports into one or more ports, is where smarter queue management gets
needed (as well as macaddr CAM), but then what you measure as
"latency" becomes rather fungible and harder to define than "tx to
rx".

Even their third test is still one to one, essentially.

I do think a good open source and fast cut-through switch design would
be a great building block to start with, particularly if they can nail
it for small packets.

All it's gotta do is timestamp on receive (for codel) from a fairly
unified clock, at the head, and hash on L4 headers (fq_codel) by the
end, but that's not within the scope of the contest design parameters,
and I imagine folk will engineer to the test to get the last ns out
instead of passing those extra 8 bytes along fore and aft.

I wish I had time to tackle this, and my verilog was less rusty, and I
wasn't such a greying grad student myself. Maybe some team from here
is already on this, laboring in secret...

It looks like a great contest, I'd love to be plotting behaviors with
flent... with ports going at line rates of 10,000, 1000, 100.... of
whatever they come up with.



-- 
Dave Täht
Let's go make home routers and wifi faster! With better software!
http://blog.cerowrt.org


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