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ClickCAM. Using Click for Exploring Power Saving Schemes in Router Architectures Jonathan Ellithorpe, Laura Keys CS 252, Spring 2009. Motivation. Energy Concerns $$ environmental Networking Impact operation costs hardware layout Where TCAM / SRAM fit in. Router – Hardware Model.
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ClickCAM Using Click for Exploring Power Saving Schemes in Router Architectures Jonathan Ellithorpe, Laura Keys CS 252, Spring 2009
Motivation • Energy Concerns • $$ • environmental • Networking Impact • operation costs • hardware layout • Where TCAM / SRAM fit in
Router – Hardware Model Power Hungry!
TCAMs (Ternary Content Addressable Memory) • Pros/Cons • Uses • Four stages • precharge • select lines • match lines • priority encoder
TCAM Configurations • Pros / cons of smaller TCAMs • Alternate Configurations • Attempts to decrease power consumption • sub-tables • paging schemes + entry compression • splitting TCAM into banks
Our Approach • Reduce power consumption with small performance degradation • Metrics • Throughput (as a percentage of packets presented) • Average Power • Success attained by decreasing power by 2x the reduction in performance
Power-saving Schemes: Sleepy Banks • If few number of unique entries accessed in a TCAM bank, turn off lesser used banks to save on static and leakage power • Pros • if traffic comes in bursts with large lapses, save on power • Cons • if traffic constantly hits in all banks, we either don't put any to sleep or else we frequently access DRAM
Power-saving Schemes: Tuple Cache • Use a smaller TCAM as a cache for low-power SDRAM • Pros • small TCAM is lower power and faster than larger one • if we have small set of frequently accessed destinations, we could potentially save a lot of power • Cons • potential to pull from DRAM frequently if unique destination set is not small enough
Experiments • Click • timing notion • UCSB's TCAM power model • randomly generated workload • represent different types of traffic
Conclusions • Hard to do power modeling in network hardware. • Proprietary black boxes • Tradeoff between power and performance is tricky! End zone hard to reach. • Banking can help, but more banks => more waking and sleeping • Workload also hard to estimate and has big impact on the power and performance tradeoff