Suez: a cluster-based scalable real-time packet router

Suez is a high-performance real-time packet router that supports fast best-effort 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-effective 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 fixed-granularity fluid fair queuing (FGFFQ) algorithm that completely eliminates the per-packet sorting overhead associated with conventional weighted fair queuing algorithms. This paper presents the architectural features of Suez, and reports the performance measurements of the Linux-based Suez prototype, which is built on four Pentium-II 400 MHz machines and Myrinet.