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Sun Microsystems announced Neptune, a 10 Gbit/second Ethernet
card and chip optimized for use with multi-threaded processors such as
Sun's Niagara. Rather than use the specialized hardware called TCP offload engines (TOEs) favored by many network companies, Sun's chip classifies and assigns traffic flows to as many as 24 threads in a server.
Sun Microsystems announced Neptune, a 10 Gbit/second Ethernet
card and chip optimized for use with multi-threaded processors such as
Sun's Niagara. Rather than use the specialized hardware called TCP offload engines (TOEs) favored by many network companies, Sun's chip classifies and assigns traffic flows to as many as 24 threads in a server.
Like Intel, Sun is taking an approach that uses its microprocessors to handle the growing processing
requirements of Ethernet. In fact, a slightly simplified version of the
90nm Neptune core now shipping on a Sun adapter card will appear as a
block in the 65nm Niagara2 processor in development at Sun.
Sun's move further fragments the emerging field of 10 Gbit Ethernet products.
A number of companies including Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft worked for several years to establish remote direct memory access approach, typically using dedicated hardware in a media access controller
to handle the overhead of 10 Gbit Ethernet. But with Sun and Intel both
rolling out their own approaches that rely on unique features in their
CPUs, the market for chips using the TOE standards will be
significantly reduced.
Sun is also open to licensing Neptune at the card or chip level
for to other vendors, though it has not completed any licensing deals.
Sun will offer the Neptune card as an option for all its
systems, whether they are based on Niagara or Intel or AMD x86
processors. However, it is not clear how Neptune will work with Intel
Xeon processors that use Intel's so-called IOAT approach to accelerating Ethernet traffic by using features on the Intel CPUs and chip sets.
Neptune sports two 10Gbit ports or can be configured to support four Gbit Ethernet links. The ASIC
includes a packet classification block that defines and assigns packet
flows to dedicated Direct Memory Access (DMA) engines on the chip. It
then binds that flow to specific CPUs and threads in a server.
Using this approach with the Sun Solaris operating system, Sun
said Neptune will deliver throughput of more than 8 Gbits/second based
on small TCP/IP packets. Sun claims throughput of more than 7.5
Gbits/second for small packets running under Linux. Large, so-called
jumbo packet frames, typically flow at full 10 Gbit/s line rates.
By contrast, Sun claims, some existing 10G Ethernet cards get
throughput of as little as 3-4 Gbits/s on the kinds of small packet
flows typical of Web servers.
"Most people can get full line speed when they use large jumbo frames,"
said Dilip Modi, a product architect in Sun's networking group. "We are
trying to establish ourselves as the leaders in 10G Ethernet in the
server," he added.
Inside Neptune, Sun has built 40 dedicated hardware DMA
blocks, 24 for transmitting and 16 for receiving data. The chip also
has un undisclosed amount of supporting buffers and interrupts to
handle breaking its 20 Gbit/s total throughput into as many as 24
separate flows, each dedicated to a specific CPU and thread.
"We do parallelism right from the start as data packets come into your
system," Modi said. "Data goes directly to a DMA engine rather than to
a common domain zero pool," he added.
Sun is updating Solaris, putting pieces of a new virtualization architecture
in place over the course of the year. New features include the ability
for a network card to bind packet flows to a particular CPU and thread.
The Sun card uses an 8x PCI Express link and consumes an
average of 20W and a maximum of 24W. The version going into the
Niagara2 CPU will have the Express link and optional 4x Gbit
configuration capabilities stripped out.
The card is available with XFP optical transceivers supporting
short or long range distances. Sun aims to demonstrate at Interop later
this year a version supporting 10GBase-T copper links using physical
layer chips from either Solarflare or Terranetics. That card will ship
at the end of the year.
The card will cost about $1,600 outfitted with short-range
optics or $1,900 with the long-range transceivers. Sun said that
compares to about $500 for today's Gbit Ethernet cards for optical
links.
Read the original article: http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197007257
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