On Wed, 14 Jan 2004 alex@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