Fulcrum Microsystems Blog

By Gary Lee

In my last post, I introduced the new FlexPipe™ packet-processing pipeline, a high performance packet engine for Fulcrum’s Alta High-Speed Ethernet switch architecture that can provide sustained performance of a billion packets per second while maintaining less than 300ns latency.  In this post, I want to cover the microcode support built into FlexPipe that delivers a new level of flexibility for supporting current and future standards and protocols without sacrificing performance.

Data center standards are constantly evolving, leaving chip makers to either wait to hard-code the protocols in the device, or to use lower performance programmable silicon and count on a software-based enhancement after the chip has been designed into a system.  Neither is ideal. But the support for microcode built into FlexPipe gives future Alta chips the performance of a hard-coded solution with the flexibility of a software solution.

Typically, when one hears the term microcode and programmable, it is assumed that the architecture is a run-to-completion or non-deterministic model.  FlexPipe operates in a deterministic manner, meaning that with any possible microcode implementation, the engine will maintain more than one billion packets per second of throughput performance while maintaining less than 300ns of latency in cut-through mode.

With the use of microcode, we can provide customers with a rich set of flexible features that can be adapted to changing market needs. Our customers can get to market early, before industry groups finalize standards, allowing future-proof system designs. It also allows us to anticipate standards that have not even been thought of yet.   Some of the known standards where the programmability comes into play include RBridge/Trill, Shortest Path Bridging, VEB, VEPA, VEPA+ multi-channel, VN-Tag, Fibre Channel, LISP or other proprietary switching headers for vertical markets.  We also plan to support OpenFlow, and will be able to keep up with this implementation as it evolves.

FlexPipe is the key differentiator for future Alta chips, giving them the performance and flexibility they need to deliver the top-of-rack switch performance necessary for high-port count virtualized networks.

Comments welcome: feedback@fulcrummicro.com

By Gary Lee

A billion packets per second.  That’s the performance of FlexPipe™, the new packet-processing engine that’s part of the Alta high-speed Ethernet switching architecture announced by Fulcrum CTO Uri Cummings at Hot Interconnects last week.

What network switch needs a billion packets per second performance?  Let’s stop first to recognize just what we’re talking about because a billion of anything is hard to visualize.

In months it would equal 82 million years (back when dinosaurs ruled the earth).  In people it would equal 1/8 of the world’s population (or the population of China in 1981).  In apps it would equal the number of downloads from the iTunes app store in the first nine months of operation.  In dollars, it’s the taxes paid by you and 103,424 of your friends.

A billion packets per second is 3X the performance of Fulcrum’s current generation of FocalPoint switch and it means that Alta-based switches will have the performance needed for applications such as virtualized data center networks.  Virtualization is increasing the density of server farms and allowing data center operators to efficiently deploy cloud services. Virtualization technology is rapidly changing, and is spreading from virtualized servers to virtualized storage, and its being pushed down into hardware by technologies like Intel’s SR-IOV.  The market is attracting acquisition dollars, and also venture capital.  There are a lot of big bets on the future of virtualization.

Those bets can pay off if the network performance is there.  FlexPipe is a pipeline that’s wide enough to support full rate, non-blocking performance for a large number of virtualized flows. And it can deliver these performance levels with all pipeline features enabled. FlexPipe brings with it FocalPoint’s 300ns of latency, which has been on the market for five years and is still five times lower than other data center Ethernet switches.

There’s much more to the FlexPipe, including the ‘Flex’ part, which refers to new programmability features that will be discussed in my next blog.

Comments Welcome: feedback@fulcrummicro.com

By Gary Lee

At Hot Interconnects today, our CTO Uri Cummings outlined the next-generation Alta 40Gb switch chip architecture. Today’s architecture-level discussion gives us the opportunity to focus on key design issues that really make a difference in the performance of networks, but often get lost in the focus on speeds and feeds that occurs when a switch chip is announced.  Fully provisioned throughput, low latency, efficient memory architecture and programmability matter as much (or more) than total port bandwidth.

This is especially true now that there is a sea change in the Ethernet market and the need for high-performance, low latency switching in interconnect applications is expanding as more data centers embrace Ethernet as a compute fabric, and as the economics of Ethernet becomes more essential to building out cloud computing services.

So, what is the Alta architecture?  Alta is a 40Gbps switch with integrated 10GB PHYs that keeps all of the benefits of the FocalPoint switch family, including 200 ns cut-through latency, which is still the lowest latency in an HSE switch to date.  The architecture has full support of data center bridging features, advanced header processing functionality and the parallel-multicast capability that makes it popular in video and Wall Street applications.

Alta marks the debut of a significant performance innovation called FlexPipe™. FlexPipe is the industry’s fastest packet processing engine with performance greater than a billion packets per second even with all pipeline features enabled. But FlexPipe is also programmable, providing the ability to reconfigure various locations in the frame-processing pipeline using microcode.  This enables flexible support for evolving data center standards such as TRILL, FCoE, MPLS and others.  Another feature of FlexPipe is deterministic performance.  FlexPipe is such an innovation that we will break down its features in two upcoming blog posts.

With Alta, FlexPipe is combined with the output queued, shared memory architecture we’ve used in FocalPoint for several years now.  This shared memory design is based on our proprietary RapidArray packet memory.  RapidArray is a key reason for the latency and throughput performance of FocalPoint.  More on this memory design is in another blog post located here.

Alta is designed to support a data center evolution that is moving from 10Gb to 40Gb, moving to support thousands of virtual servers and merging separate data and storage networks into one unified fabric.  Look here for more on Alta later this week and next week, and for the first Alta-based chip announcements in Nov.

Comments Welcome: feedback@fulcrummicro.com

By Fulcrum Microsystems

The Hot Interconnects show is coming up next week, and Fulcrum co-founder and CTO Uri Cummings will use the opportunity to debut the next-generation FocalPoint chip architecture.  More to come about this in this blog, but if you are going to Hot Interconnects, plan to go to Uri’s presentation (Aug. 18 @ 3:15 pm).  Here’s the abstract from the show website:

Introducing the Next Gen FocalPoint Architecture

In 2006, Fulcrum Microsystems launched FocalPoint and set a new standard for Ethernet by delivering the first high-scale, high-density, low-latency 10G switch architecture. FocalPoint ushered in the era of data center Ethernet and opened up the possibility of serving HPC, clustered computing and server interconnect with the same fabric. Since then, the market has taken off and the original architecture has evolved to offer higher scalability, routing, and new data center specific features such as those defined in the IEEE 802.1 DCB Task Group. Ethernet has become firmly established as the leading data-center interconnect technology. But the data center is the place to push the envelope for performance, and Ethernet must evolve both in its throughput and also in its scalability. Uri’s presentation will cover the next-generation FocalPoint architecture, called Alta, which delivers industry’s highest density, line-rate high-speed Ethernet (HSE) switch that comes with a full-speed deterministic programmable pipeline. Come see the future of next-generation data center Ethernet.

By Gary Lee

On Wall St., it seems like latency is the only thing that matters in the network these days.  That’s because brokerages are using algorithmic trading programs in a race to make trades – with the first one to execute gaining a price advantage.  Often times, it’s the latency in the network that makes the difference between which company makes the trade first.

That makes Wall Street tech tradeshows a great venue for announcing new low latency standards, and the InfiniBand Trade Association took advantage of the HPC Financial Markets show last week to announce RoCEE – the RDMA over Converged Enhanced Ethernet standard.  Remote direct memory access (RDMA) reduces endpoint latency by transferring data directly from the memory of one computer straight to the memory of another without being slowed by the operating system or the NIC memory.  RoCEE (which the IBTA is calling “RoCE”) brings RDMA to converged Ethernet architectures, much like the Internet Wide Area RDMA Protocol (iWARP) did for TCP.

RoCEE will be an interesting development for traditional InfiniBand fabrics that can now benefit from the cost-effectiveness of Ethernet, and, using FocalPoint, a very competitive fabric latency as well.  According to press reports, RoCEE should bring endpoint latency down from about 4.5 us that is standard with Ethernet to about 1.3 us.  RoCEE layers InfiniBand’s layer 2 / 3 protocols on top of Ethernet’s physical and MAC layers.

What will be the impact on the market?  Timothy Prickett Morgan of The Register asks point blank whether RoCEE will be the death of InfiniBand, before concluding probably not, but it looks like an “octogenarian’s birthday party.”  Naturally, the IBTA disagreed with that analysis.

There will always exist a need for the highest levels of performance that are now served by proprietary fabrics at the very high end, followed by InfiniBand which currently offers 40G of link bandwidth with sub microsecond endpoint latency.  But, Ethernet with RoCEE will now be able to take some of that market, where 10G of link bandwidth with low latency fabrics and endpoints can provide a significant improvement over traditional RDMA solutions.

RoCEE products should be announced soon, and it will be interesting to test them along with a FocalPoint fabric to show this improved performance.  In the end, though, we believe that RoCEE signals the continued expansion of Ethernet in the data center and a graceful way to leverage emerging Ethernet technologies.

By: Gary Lee

Network security was a central focus at the Linley Tech Spring Conference last week, where I presented on advanced memory architectures to an audience of about 60 engineers.

The network security theme resonated with me due to several key features that make FocalPoint ideally suited for enabling network security applications.  In fact, FocalPoint has gained strong traction in this market due to features such as an advanced header classification engine that can preprocess packets and insert the result of the classification in a header tag.  This feature can help reduce the load on down stream processors, and the classification engine can also direct flows to the proper processing resource (CPU or NPU) based on deep header inspection.

Many of the Linley network security presentations brought up the problem of dealing with high bandwidth 40G and 100G network connections. FocalPoint’s advanced hashing algorithms allow efficient flow distribution across multiple security blades in a chassis switch, effectively reducing the bandwidth load on each blade.

FocalPoint also provides symmetrical hashing and the hash key can be derived for various user defined header fields. Simple fail-over mechanisms allow flow re-distribution in the event of a security blade failure. Also, the low cut-through latency of FocalPoint makes security processing a true “bump in the wire,” with very little impact on network performance.

Overall, it was a well-attended event, and I received many good questions after my presentation.  Click here for a copy of my slides.

By: Gary Lee

Recently, Juniper Networks unveiled its new offerings aimed at flattening out the architecture in the data center.  Per this article in Network World, the products included switches, routers, software and services.

“Juniper is proposing a “3-2-1″ data center network architecture designed to allow customers to flatten and simplify legacy data center networks. Juniper says its Virtual Chassis fabric technology, in which 10 Juniper fixed-configuration switches can be interconnected into a single “switch” supporting hundreds of Gigabit Ethernet ports, can reduce three layers to two today.”

Juniper’s Project Stratus, of course, aims at ultimately collapsing the infrastructure to one flat any-device-connected-to-any-device layer in the future.

This is similar to the fat tree architecture that we at Fulcrum feel is the right way to build a converged data center network.  That’s because this architecture offers great performance and redundancy while being able to  scale efficiently into the thousands of ports.  Juniper is on the right track, but needs advanced technology such as FocalPoint to take this architecture to 10G and beyond.

The ultra low latency, scalability and data center bridging features of FocalPoint enable this new data center architecture (per the Voltaire-BNT partnership).  But as long as switch vendors continue to use either proprietary or merchant silicon other than FocalPoint, this flat architecture will not become a reality.  Switches in this flattened architecture need to be low latency and completely non-blocking and, thus, need the congestion management and flow control features FocalPoint provides.

By: Gary Lee

As announced today on the Fulcrum website, I will be speaking at this week’s Linley Tech Spring Seminar.  From our press release:

Much as has been written about the advantages of output queued shared memory switch architectures, but few switch devices have been able to take advantage of this due to performance and design constraints.  My presentation will outline the unique set of technologies that has enabled FocalPoint switches to get around these constraints and make a reality out of what had been little more than an abstract academic concept before.

During my presentation, I will be discussing the FocalPoint output queued architecture compared to the combined input/output queued (CIOQ) architectures employed that you see in other switches.  Because of its use of the OQ architecture, FocalPoint stands above the competition in a number of applications and for a number of reasons:

• Low cut-through latency
• Low multicast jitter
• Eliminates queue under-run for TDM traffic
• Allows creation of virtual switch planes for traffic isolation of
  • Control plane traffic
  • Storage traffic such as FCoE
  • TDM traffic
  • Voice, video and data in telecom systems

Translation: higher performance for lower cost.  If you will be at the event, come by session seven (10G Ethernet in the Data Center) and ask a question or two.  For those of you who can’t make it, I’ll put together a more in-depth blog of the conference when I get back.

By Gary Lee

I’m at the Ethernet Technology Summit today to present on the fabric needs of FCOE data center switches (more on that in another post), and in looking over the keynotes for the show, I was struck by the number of discussions centered on video traffic.

It is clear that we are entering a world in which video distribution is becoming a key network traffic component. A 2009 report issued by Cisco stated that all forms of video are expected to exceed 90% of all consumer Internet traffic by 2013. To support this trend, though, switching infrastructure needs to efficiently support multicast traffic.

We’ve been anticipating this demand and considering what features need to be built into the switch to support this traffic.  The FocalPoint family of 10GbE switch silicon has been architected with video distribution and multicast traffic in mind.  FocalPoint’s output queued shared memory architecture queues multicast traffic only once, reducing internal switch congestion and memory requirements.

In addition, video traffic can be assigned a unique traffic class along with a dedicated memory partition in the switch, allowing it to be flow controlled separately from other data traffic using IEEE Priority Flow Control frames. This minimizes both video latency and traffic loss. At the switch egress, video traffic can be giving minimum bandwidth guarantees, which translates to bounded latency jitter.

Latency jitter is a key parameter in video distribution networks as it impacts the size of memory buffers required at the location where video is being reproduced, which in turn drives the cost of video distribution systems or set-top boxes. In addition to bounded latency jitter, FocalPoint can also operate in cut-through mode with absolute latencies around 200nS and P-P latency jitter of less than 50nS. All of this leads to cost savings for both the service provider and consumer.

Comments Welcome: feedback@fulcrummicro.com

You might have seen the news this week that Fortinet® has chosen FocalPoint silicon for its recently announced FortiSwitch-1000 chassis-based switching platform.  Fortinet is a leading network security provider and worldwide leader of unified threat management (UTM) solutions.  As Fortinet Senior Director of Data Center Strategy Marshall Bartoszek observed:

“One of the keys to this [new switch family] is the FocalPoint architecture, which provides high performance at the core of our architecture and powers the vScale congestion-avoidance features that give our switches a distinct, low latency competitive advantage.”

The FortiSwitch-1000 is another example of a FocalPoint-enabled fat tree network architecture providing non-blocking Ethernet fabrics for even the largest data centers.  Data Center Bridging features built into FocalPoint provide the FortiSwitch family a silicon solution that enables the high-performance network fabrics required by data centers for latency sensitive tasks and high-speed interconnect applications, including server virtualization, data center consolidation and cloud-based computing.

Read the full release here…

Comments welcome: feedback@fulcrummicro.com