Broadcom Corporation

Innovium, Inc.

Avago Technologies International Sales Pte. Limited

Marvell Asia Pte., Ltd.

Avago Technologies General IP (singapore) Pte. Ltd.

Avago Technologies General IP Pte, Ltd.

Bruce Hui Kwan

Puneet Agarwal

William Brad Matthews

Brad Matthews

Ajit Kumar Jain

Mohan V Kalkunte

Vahid Tabatabaee

Mohammad Kamel Issa

Avinash Gyanendra Mani

Neil Barrett

Chien-Hsien Wu

Jin Ding

Amit Kumar

Eugene Opsasnick

Ariel Hendel

Paul Kim

Eric Baden

Philip H Chen

Asad Khamisy

Venkateshwar Buduma

John Jeffrey Dull

Nicholas Kucharewski

Shahram Davari

Ashwin Alapati

Song-Huo Yu

Jeff Dull

Lakshmikantha Ashvin

Ashvin Lakshmikantha

William Fan

In response to certain events in a network device, visibility packets may be generated. A visibility packet may be or comprise at least a portion of a packet that is in some way associated with the event, such as a packet that was dropped as a result of an event, or that was in a queue at the time of an event related to that queue. A visibility packet may be tagged or otherwise indicated as a visibility packet. The network device may include one or more visibility samplers through which visibility packets are routed on their way to a visibility queue, visibility subsystem, and/or out of the network device. The samplers allow only a limited sample of the visibility packets that they receive to pass through the sampler, essentially acting as a filter to reduce the amount of visibility packets that will be processed.

Visibility sampling

Efficient scaling of in-network compute operations to large numbers of compute nodes is disclosed. Each compute node is connected to a same plurality of network compute nodes, such as compute-enabled network switches. Compute processes at the compute nodes generate local gradients or other vectors by, for instance, performing a forward pass on a neural network. Each vector comprises values for a same set of vector elements. Each network compute node is assigned to, based on the local vectors, reduce vector data for a different a subset of the vector elements. Each network compute node returns a result chunk for the elements it processed back to each of the compute nodes, whereby each compute node receives the full result vector. This configuration may, in some embodiments, reduce buffering, processing, and/or other resource requirements for the network compute node or network at large.

Massively parallel in-network compute

A network device includes ingress queues for storing data units while the data units are being processed by ingress packet processors, and a plurality of egress buffer memories for storing data units received from the ingress queues while the data units are being processed by the egress packet processors. First circuitry controls respective rates at which data units are transferred from ingress queues to egress buffer memories. Second circuitry monitors the egress buffer memories for congestion and sends, to the first circuitry, flow control messages related to congestion resulting of egress buffer memories. The first circuitry progressively increases over time a rate at which data from each ingress queue are transferred to an egress buffer memory in response to receiving a flow control message that indicates that congestion corresponding to the egress buffer memory has ended.

Queue pacing in a network device

A network device obtains measurement data for one or more device attributes or environmental factors, and compares the measurement data to respective ranges specified for the device attributes or the environmental factors. Different ranges for the device attributes or the environmental factors are associated with different operating regions (OREs) classified for the device. The operating state of the network device corresponds to a first ORE of the different OREs, and various tasks performed by the device in the operating state are based on configurations specified by the first ORE. Based on comparing the measurement data, the network device identifies a second ORE that includes ranges for the device attributes or the environmental factors that match the measurement data. The network device transitions the operating state to correspond to the second ORE, and adjusting the tasks performed by the device according to configurations specified by the second ORE.

Reducing power consumption in an electronic device

When a measure of buffer space queued for garbage collection in a network device grows beyond a certain threshold, one or more actions are taken to decreasing an enqueue rate of certain classes of traffic, such as of multicast traffic, whose reception may have caused and/or be likely to exacerbate garbage-collection-related performance issues. When the amount of buffer space queued for garbage collection shrinks to an acceptable level, these one or more actions may be reversed. In an embodiment, to more optimally handle multi-destination traffic, queue admission control logic for high-priority multi-destination data units, such as mirrored traffic, may be performed for each destination of the data units prior to linking the data units to a replication queue. If a high-priority multi-destination data unit is admitted to any queue, the high-priority multi-destination data unit can no longer be dropped, and is linked to a replication queue for replication.

Multi-destination traffic handling optimizations in a network device

A traffic manager is shared amongst two or more egress blocks of a network device, thereby allowing traffic management resources to be shared between the egress blocks. Schedulers within a traffic manager may generate and queue read instructions for reading buffered portions of data units that are ready to be sent to the egress blocks. The traffic manager may be configured to select a read instruction for a given buffer bank from the read instruction queues based on a scoring mechanism or other selection logic. To avoid sending too much data to an egress block during a given time slot, once a data unit portion has been read from the buffer, it may be temporarily stored in a shallow read data cache. Alternatively, a single, non-bank specific controller may determine all of the read instructions and write operations that should be executed in a given time slot.

Shared traffic manager

Approaches, techniques, and mechanisms are disclosed for improving operations of a network switching device and/or network-at-large by utilizing queue delay as a basis for measuring congestion for the purposes of Automated Queue Management ('AQM') and/or other congestion-based policies. Queue delay is an exact or approximate measure of the amount of time a data unit waits at a network device as a consequence of queuing, such as the amount of time the data unit spends in an egress queue while the data unit is being buffered by a traffic manager. Queue delay may be used as a substitute for queue size in existing AQM, Weighted Random Early Detection ('WRED'), Tail Drop, Explicit Congestion Notification (&#x201c;ECN&#x201d;), reflection, and/or other congestion management or notification algorithms. Or, a congestion score calculated based on the queue delay and one or more other metrics, such as queue size, may be used as a substitute.

Delay-based automatic queue management and tail drop

Approaches, techniques, and mechanisms facilitate actionable reporting of network state information and real-time, autonomous network engineering directly in-network at a switch or other network device. A data collector within the network device collects state information and/or data unit information from various device components, such as traffic managers and packet processors. The data collector, which may optionally generate additional state information by performing various calculations on the information it receives, is configured to then provide at least some of the state information to an analyzer device connected to an analyzer interface. The analyzer device, which may be a separate device, performs various analyses on the state information, depending on how it is configured. The analyzer device outputs reports that identify statuses, errors, misconfigurations, and/or suggested actions to take to improve operation of the network device. In an embodiment, some or all actions that may be suggested therein ae executed automatically.

Traffic analyzer for network device

A network traffic manager receives, from an ingress port in a group of ingress ports, a cell of a packet destined for an egress port. Upon determining that a number of cells of the packet stored in a buffer queue meets a threshold value, the manager checks whether the group of ingress ports has been assigned a token for the queue. Upon determining that the group of ingress ports has been assigned the token, the manager determines that other cells of the packet are stored in the buffer, and accordingly stores the received cell in the buffer, and stores linking information for the received cell in a receive context for the packet. When all cells of the packet have been received, the manager copies linking information for the packet cells to the buffer queue or a copy generator queue, and releases the token from the group of ingress ports.

Processing packets in an electronic device

Growing community of inventors

Sunnyvale, CA, United States of America

Bruce Hui Kwan