To date, practical experience in constructing switching networks using IEEE 1355 technology [1] has been confined to relatively small systems and there are no experimental results on how the performance of such systems will scale up to several hundred or even several thousand nodes. Some theoretical studies [2, 3] have been carried out for large networks of up to one thousand nodes for different topologies.
We present results obtained on a large modular testbed using 100 Mbits/s point to point DS links. Up to 1024 nodes will be interconnected by a switching fabric based on the 32 way STC104 packet switch [4]. The system has been designed and constructed in a modular way to allow a variety of different network topologies to be investigated (Clos, grid, torus, etc.). Network throughput and latency are being studied for various traffic conditions as a function of the topology and network size.
The work presented has been carried out within the framework of the
European Union's Esprit
program as part of the Macramé [5] project (Esprit
project 8603).