Suez: A Cluster-based Scalable Real-Time Packet Router

Suez is a high-performance real-time packet router that supports fast best-eeort packet routing and scalable QoS-guaranteed packet scheduling, and is built on a hardware platform consisting of a cluster of commodity PCs connected by a gigabit/sec system area network. The major goal of the Suez project is to demonstrate that the PC cluster architecture can be as cost-eeective a platform for high-performance network packet routing as for parallel computing. Suez features a cache-conscious routing-table search algorithm that exploits CPU caching hardware for fast lookup by treating IP addresses directly as virtual addresses. To scale the number of real-time connections supportable with the link speed, Suez implements a xed-granularity uid fair queuing (FGFFQ) algorithm that completely eliminates the per-packet sorting overhead associated with conventional weighted fair queuing algorithms. With the use of general-purpose CPU as the main processing engine, Suez is inherently a programmable network device that could be dynamically extended with functionalities important to end user applications or to the eeciency of the entire network. This paper describes in detail the architectural features of Suez, and reports the performance measurements of the initial Suez prototype, which is built on four Pentium-II 400MHz machines and Myrinet, running the Linux operating system.