[Click] [OT] - Any suggestions on what hardware to buy?

[Nicholas Weaver]

On Fri, Apr 21, 2006 at 12:21:42PM -0400, Roman Chertov composed:
> 
> Alastair McKinley wrote:
> > Hi everyone,
> > 
> > Apologies for the slightly off topic question.
> > 
> > I want to run Click on a powerful machine with lots of interfaces
> > (10-50, the more the better), and I was hoping that someone here might
> > have an idea what to look for.
> > 
> > I guess I want e1000 NICS to support polling.  Can I buy such a beast
> > off the shelf or should I build my own?  If I were to build it, what
> > would I get to support enough e1000 NICS? 
> 
> I know that you can buy multi-port Intel Pros (e1000).  So you can get 
> by with fewer cards.  I think 4 is the maximum.  That would require you 
> to have 10 PCI slots to get 40 ports.  I am not sure who builds such 
> motherboards.  Also you want the motherboard to have PCI-E bus to allow 
> for maximum throughput.  Ideally you would use a at least two processors
> for this thing.  Although I think this all depends on what traffic you 
> expect to deal with.  If you expect the traffic to be small then you can 
> get buy with a lesser machine.

One comment:  How much bandwidth do you expect to be pulling?

It might be substantially cheaper & easier to have a 48 port managed
ethernet switch, and use fixed VLAN configurations to concentrate it
down to 8 Gigabit cards in the host.  Since there is no whay you'd be
able to support high bandwidth for 10+ ports in software, you might as
well have the switch handle the port multiplexing etc.



> > 
> > Should I be looking to run multi-threaded Click on SMP?
> 
> You need SMP to get the full benefits of multi-threaded click.
> 
> Roman
> 
> > 
> > Again, apologies for the off-topic question.  
> > 
> > Best regards,
> > 
> > Alastair
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > click mailing list
> > click at amsterdam.lcs.mit.edu
> > https://amsterdam.lcs.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/click
> > 
> _______________________________________________
> click mailing list
> click at amsterdam.lcs.mit.edu
> https://amsterdam.lcs.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/click

-- 
Nicholas C. Weaver                               nweaver at icsi.berkeley.edu
     This message has been ROT-13 encrypted twice for higher security.