Welcome to the Gigabit Network Kits Site

This web site is provided for participants in Washington University's Gigabit Network Technology Distribution Program. This program provides systems researchers with open, high performance networking equipment for use n experimental systems research.

In recent years, research in networking, distributed systems and high performance computing has been hampered by the research community's limited access to high performance networking equipment, and more importantly, the detailed technical information needed to use it effectively in experimental systems research programs. Systems researchers require detailed technical information regarding their research infrastructure and the ability to modify that infrastructure (by replacing software, adding hardware extensions or modifying existing hardware). These needs are incompatible with the objectives of commercial vendors who are unwilling to make their products' proprietary details public and who are ill-prepared to support activities by research users. Even when companies occasionally make technical information available to researchers, limitations on publication of results obtained using this information makes it difficult for others in the research community to verify results and extend them. The same constraints on the use of commercial equipment drastically limits its utility in education, since students in systems-oriented courses have limited opportunity to explore the internals of a non-trivial system and make experimental modifications.

The National Science Foundation is supporting the Gigabit Network Technology Distribution program at Washington University to address this problem, through the distribution of an open, non-proprietary, gigabit networking package to the academic community for use in research and education. The package includes a high performance ATM switch, network interface cards, complete documentation and source to software and hardware. We refer to this package as a Gigabit Network Kit. The kits enable systems researchers to more effectively pursue a wide range of research agendas in networking, distributed systems and high performance computing. By providing a significant cross-section of the research community with a common open research platform, it will also facilitate sharing of ideas, results, experimental software and experimental hardware. At the same time, it will allow students in systems-oriented courses to obtain an experience that is not readily available.

The Gigabit Network Kits are based on technology that has been developed at Washington University with support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and NSF. The ATM switches support several different link speeds up to 2.4 Gb/s. The ATM Network Interface Cards (NICs) operate at up to 1.2 Gb/s. Both the switches and the NICs have been designed for both high performance and flexibility, allowing them to be used in many different ways. In particular, their use is by no means limited to ATM-related projects. Indeed, the kits can provide an effective platform for IP-oriented research, or more broadly for distributed systems and high performance applications research. The various hardware and software components are designed to facilitate use in many different ways. Clean and well-documented application programmers' interfaces are provided at different levels in the software, allowing researchers to use as much or as little of the provided software as they desire. The mechanisms for remote control of the switch hardware and APIC allow research groups to control the hardware from whatever platform is most convenient or suitable for their use. The line card interface to the switch has a simple, well-documented parallel interface (based on the Utopia standard) which facilitates the addition of experimental hardware. The NIC supports the industry-standard PCI bus, making it directly usable with a variety of different computer platforms. Its dual ATM ports allow it to be used to support a variety of different uses, including non-intrusive network monitoring, in-line processing of selected data streams and cluster computing. The list below provides examples of different potential uses of the gigabit network kits.

• Application Experiments. Research groups can implement a variety of parallel or distributed applications on top of the gigabit network kits and exploit the kits' high bandwidth and unique features to enhance application performance.
• Gigabit IP Switches. A gigabit switch, together with a workstation can provide a high performance IP switch, in which IP flows are bound to ATM virtual circuits as a side effect of routing decisions made by a conventional IP router in the workstation. This approach has recently been proposed commercially, but there has been little or no research study of the concept.
• Gigabit IP Routers. A high performance experimental IP router can be constructed by augmenting a gigabit switch with one or more general purpose processors at each port, using APICS to efficiently gain access to the ATM cell stream. This can be done with no hardware design if one simply uses standard workstations equipped with APICs.
• Active Networking. Active networking is a concept which seeks to make network behavior programmable by users. By embedding programmable elements in network links and switches, users can be given more control over how the network treats their data in the presence of congestion and can provide special services (video compression or transcoding) that are inconvenient or expensive to provide in end-systems.
• Workstation Cluster Computers. The independent ATM interfaces on an APIC, allow computers with APICs to be connected together in arbitrary topologies (for example a rectangular grid, or perfect shuffle). This allows the construction of inexpensive, high performance workstation clusters with lots of bandwidth and low latencies from machine to machine.
• Switch Control. The gigabit kits provide an ideal environment for work on new models of signaling and control. The ability to gain full access to the switch hardware and use it in unconventional ways enables this kind of use.
• Congestion Control. The switch kits make it possible to implement novel congestion control mechanisms, by building and experimenting with a programmable line card. A line card that includes one or more FPGAs and a large on-board memory would enable this kind of experimentation, and allow a variety of different approaches to be evaluated and compared.
• Gigabit Hardware Design. Since the chip set being designed for the gigabit switch and the APIC are fully specified in VHDL, there is the possibility for research groups with the appropriate expertise to create custom modifications to the chip set in order to implement novel features. The existence of an open chip set would allow groups that lack the expertise or staff to carry out a large systems project, to still pursue interesting hardware-related research projects.
• System Software for End Systems. The APIC-based NICs that will be supplied with the kits can be used in a variety of different ways by operating systems and higher level software. Researchers interested in experimenting with distributed-shared memory models of communication or management of multimedia streams will find that the kits provide an appropriate platform for such research projects.
• Host-Network Interface Design. The APIC can provide the basis for a variety of different device interfaces, including direct display interfaces, direct interfaces to mass storage devices, etc. Research groups with the appropriate expertise could obtain additional copies of the APIC to support novel host interface designs, while using the gigabit network kits as a base upon which to build and as a concrete example of a fully implemented design to help guide their own efforts.

Prepared by Jonathan Turner: jst@cs.wustl.edu. Last updated 1/9/97.