Evaluation of the Delivery QoS Characteristics of Gigabit Ethernet Switches

The event selection system for ATLAS is designed to perform real-time image processing on particle collision data equivalent to 2 TB/s. This data is filtered by a multi-level architecture, resulting in 200 GB/s of data analysed by a distributed system consisting of several thousand PCs and switches. As part of our ongoing work on this system, we performed tests on several Gigabit Ethernet switches manufactured by market leaders, using our custom-built test equipment. We analysed the implications of running network devices at, and just beyond, saturation while deploying service differentiation mechanisms. We quantified the quality degradation that traffic flows experienced when passing through switches. We focused on emergent properties in saturation, including fairness and fidelity to expectations. We discuss the ideals for switch behaviour and compare them against the observed behaviour of real implementations of differentiation mechanisms in switches. This creates a generic benchmark, which is independent of the switch internals.