Intel Corporation

Fulcrum Microsystems, Inc.

Zhi-Hern Loh

Uri V Cummings

Robert G Southworth

Michael I Davies

Techniques are described for optimizing broadcast and collect primitives in switch fabrics. A switch is described for use in a switch fabric that includes a plurality of switches configured to interconnect a plurality of host devices. The switch includes a plurality of ports configured to receive and transmit data, and switch logic configured to facilitate transfer of the data among the ports. The switch logic is configured to implement a collect function in which responses from multiple destination host devices are collected and aggregated for transmission to a source host device. A first portion of the switch logic is configured to identify, count, and discard the responses in a data plane of the switch. A second portion of the switch logic is configured to generate an aggregated response in a control plane of the switch and introduce the aggregated response into the data plane for transmission toward the source host device.

Switch fabric primitives

Global ports are supported in multi-switch systems having arbitrary topologies. In some implementations, global ports are implemented in a manner which makes the switch system robust in the face of link failure. In specific Ethernet implementations, global ports enable flooding, learning, forwarding, and link aggregation across the switch system.

Global ports in multi-switch systems

A shared memory switch and switch fabric architecture are described which employ partitions of the shared memory to implement multiple, independent virtual congestion domains, thereby allowing congestion to be handled for different classes of traffic independently.

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Pasadena, CA, United States of America

Zhi-Hern Loh