Realization of a 1000-node high-speed packet switching network

Large data switching networks are promianntly featured in future experimental proposals such as the High-Energy Physics programme for the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The technology to support this is now becoming available from industry in a variety of forms, one of which is the proposed IEEE P1355 standard. We describe a project to construct a large network testbed using P1355 point-to-point links and STC104 packet routers. A variety of nodes will be connected to this network, and its performance in terms of latency and throughput will be measured and compared with the result of simulation. A large number of cheap, so-called simple nodes will be used to generate known traddic patterns. Against the background of this predefined traffic, test packets will be injected by more intelligent nodes and will be used to study network performance. Measurements have been done on engineering samples of the communication chips and these are compared with expected performance. Finally, the future developments and measurements to be made will be presented. This work is mainly supported by the MACRAME project, ESPRIT 8603.