Godkända
Network Interface Card and Switch Integration
Diptyajit Choudhury ()
Start
2013-04-02
Presentation
2014-05-16 13:00
Plats:
E:2311
Avslutat:
2014-06-01
Examensrapport:
Sammanfattning
Today server computers are being stacked in racks. A computer rack consists of 40+ [1] server computers connected to a top of rack switch. This top of rack switch is then connected to other racks. Together they form a large cluster of computers which are used in today's cloud computing. Each server has one or sometimes two Network Interface Cards (NICs) which are connected to the top of rack switch. The functionality of the NIC is to transport the packets from the server's main memory onto a standard such as Ethernet and then transfer them to the network. However today inside a server the protocol to transport packets in and from the main memory is already done by Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) protocol. It can therefore be argued that the NIC's function is useless. Since it will only translate PCIe packets to Ethernet packets. Hence the NIC functionality, i.e. going from PCI express to Ethernet can be put into the switch instead. In this project a NIC is built from scratch to understand how it works and understand networking and networking hardware to achieve this vision. Then the PCIe protocol is studied in detail and a customized PCIe IP is implemented and veried to prove that it can be utilized for the project. Hardware tests are conducted on a FPGA interfaced with a host computer using this protocol. Finally, a theoretical investigation of the costs and feasibility of supporting a new networking protocol called Quantized Congestion Notication (QCN) in a novel NIC-switch hybrid device is provided.
Handledare: Robert Wikander (Packet Architects AB)
Examinator: Joachim Rodrigues (EIT)