As part of the ARCHES project a 128 node 1 GBaud HS link testbed is being constructed. Initial work has been carried out to investigate the behaviour of the silicon components to be used. An evaluation board containing a single 8-port Rcube [15] switch and two Bullit [16] link adapters has been constructed and is shown in figure 9. The Rcube switch currently runs error free with link speeds of up to 768 MBaud in full-duplex mode, corresponding to a data rate of 62 Mbytes/s per direction for 1024 byte messages. Higher speed tests will soon be started. The packet latency across the Rcube has been measured at 180 ns.
Figure 9: : The Rcube and Bullit evaluation board