Appendix A

The Digital's GIGAswitch is a modular FDDI bridge. Main characteristic of this switch are the following:

• up to 22 full-duplex FDDI ports,
• 3,8 million of minimum-sized FDDI packets per second,
• unicast packing movement done in hardware, multicasting managed in software,
• forwarding latency of 14 microseconds or approximately 125 bytes at 100 Mbps,
• capacity of filtering 440,000 minimum-sized packets per second per port,
• flooding or multicast rate of 2,700 packets per second.

The KLOE configuration is shown in Figure 2. Any level 2 CPU is connected to a port of the switch. The Run Control node, online farm and monitor nodes are also connected to dedicated switch ports.

Figure: GIGAswitch connections