[Beowulf] 48-port 10gig switches?

[Tom Ammon]

Interesting. Although, I'm still not convinced it's a single switching 
asic. The switch chip is, of course, not the only "chip" in the switch. 
This article says the "networking protocols" run on a single chip. The 
official Voltaire press release at 
http://www.voltaire.com/NewsAndEvents/Press_Releases/press2010/Voltaire_Announces_High_Density_10_GbE_Switch_for_Efficient_Scaling_of_Cloud_Networks

doesn't say anything about a single switching asic - perhaps the author 
made an assumption about the product? You'd think they would really tout 
the fact if they had a single chip that dense.

Last time I talked with the Arista people, their nonblocking 48 port 
switch (one of two options for a 48-port switch, IIRC) was not a single 
chip - it was a non-blocking 6-chip CLOS design. And, I agree, the price 
was compelling.

So I still think there's not a 48 port 10GbE switch chip, at least not 
in merchant silicon. I don't know much about what cisco is cooking up on 
10GbE. I know Juniper was rebranding BNT (which was fulcrum-based). I 
also heard about Extreme's top of rack 10GbE but it was only 24 ports - 
you have to stack two of them together to get 48 ports.

So my answer to your original question is that since there's not 
single-chip 48p, you still have to chain together 24-port chips to get 
line-rate 10GbE performance. I'm happy to be corrected, of course - but 
a seemingly misguided statement in an article in the trade press doesn't 
seem like a very good product announcement for an innovation like that.

Tom

On 09/02/2010 12:00 AM, Greg Lindahl wrote:
> Press about the new Voltaire 6048 48p 10g switch indicates that it's a
> single switch chip:
>
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/30/voltaire_vantage_6048/
>
> Arista seems to have a similar product at a similarish list price, and
> that list price is a lot less than chassis switches using 24p silicon.
>
> Fujitsu isn't selling a 48p switch, and I'm not up enough on silicon
> vendors to tell you if Fulcrum is still the only other vendor. I
> used to know this stuff, then I left HPC to build a search engine :-)
>
> -- greg
>
> On Wed, Sep 01, 2010 at 10:15:25PM -0600, Tom Ammon wrote:
>    
>> I hadn't heard about any 48-port 10GbE switch chips. Fulcrum and Dune
>> don't show anything like that on their websites. Where did you hear
>> about 48-port 10G asics? 24-port chips are pretty easy to find, but I
>> hadn't heard about 48-port'ers.
>>
>> Tom
>>
>> On 09/01/2010 07:17 PM, Greg Lindahl wrote:
>>      
>>> I'm in the market for 48-port 10gig switches (preferably not a
>>> chassis), and was wondering if anyone other than Arista and (soon)
>>> Voltaire makes them? Force10 seems to only have a chassis that big?
>>> Cisco isn't my favorite vendor anyway. One would think that the
>>> availability of a single-chip 48-port 10gig chip would lead to more
>>> than just 2 vendors selling 'em.
>>>
>>> -- greg
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>> -- 
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Tom Ammon
>> Network Engineer
>> Office: 801.587.0976
>> Mobile: 801.674.9273
>>
>> Center for High Performance Computing
>> University of Utah
>> http://www.chpc.utah.edu
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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-- 
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Tom Ammon
Network Engineer
Office: 801.587.0976
Mobile: 801.674.9273

Center for High Performance Computing
University of Utah
http://www.chpc.utah.edu

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