Designing SANs to Support Low-Fanout Multicasts

System area networks (SANs) need to support low-fanout multicasts efficiently in addition to broadcasts and unicasts. A critical component in SANs is the switch, which is commonly designed around crossbars. We present new switch designs using a combination of low-cost multistage switching fabrics and input and output buffering with hardware based packet scheduling mechanism. Using detailed simulations, we show that the proposed designs can scale to 512-ports and outperform crossbar based designs in a 4-switch SAN.

[1]  Rich Seifert.  Gigabit Ethernet , 2001, LCN.

[2]  Ka Lun Eddie Law,et al.  A Large Scalable ATM Multicast Switch , 1997, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun..

[3]  Duncan H. Lawrie,et al.  Access and Alignment of Data in an Array Processor , 1975, IEEE Transactions on Computers.

[4]  Walter Willinger,et al.  On the self-similar nature of Ethernet traffic , 1993, SIGCOMM '93.

[5]  Nick McKeown,et al.  Multicast Scheduling for Input-Queued Switches , 1997, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun..

[6]  Cauligi S. Raghavendra,et al.  Designing efficient Benes and Banyan based input-buffered ATM switches , 1999, 1999 IEEE International Conference on Communications (Cat. No. 99CH36311).

[7]  J.W. Mark,et al.  Multicasting in the SCOQ switch , 1994, Proceedings of INFOCOM '94 Conference on Computer Communications.

[8]  H. Jonathan Chao,et al.  Design and analysis of a large-scale multicast output buffered ATM switch , 1995, TNET.

[9]  Charles L. Seitz,et al.  Myrinet: A Gigabit-per-Second Local Area Network , 1995, IEEE Micro.

[10]  Michael Burrows,et al.  Autonet: A High-Speed, Self-Configuring Local Area Network Using Point-to-Point Links , 1991, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun..

[11]  Sally Floyd,et al.  Wide area traffic: the failure of Poisson modeling , 1995, TNET.

[12]  Anthony S. Acampora,et al.  The Knockout Switch: A Simple, Modular Architecture for High-Performance Packet Switching , 1987, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun..

[13]  R.J.F. de Vries.  ATM multicast connections using the Gauss switch , 1990 .