Enabling General Purpose Network Infrastructure
The RouteBricks project seeks to enable networks that are easy to
build, program and evolve. Networks have traditionally been built
using special-purpose hardware and software which makes them difficult
to extend, program or otherwise experiment with. Routebricks instead
allows ordinary programmers to rapidly build and (re)program networks
using the hardware and software platforms they are most familiar with
that of the general-purpose PC. To achieve this, we are exploring a
novel network architecture in which network packets are processed in
software running on clusters of general-purpose PC hardware. This
approach allows us to achieve high network processing speeds while
offering significant advantages over specialized network equipment:
lower costs due to large-volume manufacturing, a widespread
supply/support chain, and, most importantly, programmability and
extensibility.