Performance evaluation of a high-speed switching system based on the fibre channel standard

Abstract

The authors present a performance study of a switching system being designed for use in the high-performance switching system (HPSS) project at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The HPSS is a distributed switching system designed to operate with the protocols of the proposed ANSI fibre channel standard (FCS). The system is based on a folded version of the Clos three-stage network and its largest configuration has 4096 ports, each operating at 1.0625 Gbit/s. A detailed simulation model is used to evaluate the throughput, setup time, and blocking at various stages in an HPSS configuration with 512 ports. The results indicate that the system can sustain a throughput that is within 70 to 80 percent of the maximum theoretical limit for the authors choice of operational parameters.<>