Thomas Anderson, Susan Owicki, James Saxe, and Charles Thacker.
High Speed Switch Scheduling for Local Area Networks. ACM Transactions
on Computer Systems 11, 4, pp. 319 - 352. November 1993. Also appeared as Award
Paper in Proc. of the Fifth International Conference on Architectural
Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, October 1992.
Abstract:
Current technology trends make it possible to build communication networks
that can support high-performance distributed computing. This paper describes
issues in the design of a prototype switch for an arbitrary topology
point-to-point network with link speeds of up to 1 Gbit/s. The switch deals in
fixed-length ATM-style cells, which it can process at a rate of 37 million cells
per second. It provides high bandwidth and low latency for datagram traffic. In
addition, it supports real-time traffic by providing bandwidth reservations with
guaranteed latency bounds. The key to the switch's operation is a technique
called