# Building a super-router utilizing a Fermi card?

## Simba7

Just curious..

Is there a way to build a high traffic router using a Six-core, quad processor system and a set of Fermi cards? I was thinking of this a few evenings ago and thought "this would be able to move a rather huge amount of traffic without issues", providing we can get the Fermi cards to also handle internal routing of traffic.

I think the only bottleneck would be the network cards themselves. You'd have to have a set of 10GigE or 40GigE cards (PCI-e x :Cool:  and possibly their own dedicated lanes. I haven't seen a 100GigE card for PCI-e yet.

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## DaggyStyle

 *Simba7 wrote:*   

> Just curious..
> 
> Is there a way to build a high traffic router using a Six-core, quad processor system and a set of Fermi cards? I was thinking of this a few evenings ago and thought "this would be able to move a rather huge amount of traffic without issues", providing we can get the Fermi cards to also handle internal routing of traffic.
> 
> I think the only bottleneck would be the network cards themselves. You'd have to have a set of 10GigE or 40GigE cards (PCI-e x and possibly their own dedicated lanes. I haven't seen a 100GigE card for PCI-e yet.

 

afaik, an pentium I 133mhz can be an excellent router so a setup like you want will do it, but I think a simple dual without fermi can an excellent work, not sure why you need all that power for.

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## Mad Merlin

a) Network traffic doesn't involve much floating point, floating point is what video cards do.

b) Switching network traffic doesn't really take much CPU time. There's a reason network switches have relatively slow CPUs and lots of dedicated lanes to switch traffic directly from one port to another.

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## Simba7

 *DaggyStyle wrote:*   

> afaik, an pentium I 133mhz can be an excellent router so a setup like you want will do it, but I think a simple dual without fermi can an excellent work, not sure why you need all that power for.

 

I'll be the first to admit that. My main router is a Dual PIII @ 1GHz with 512MB, my secondary router is a P200MMX with 256MB.

Of course, they both run OpenVPN. I do worry that the P200MMX would get bogged down with several VPN connections since the Dual P3 handles it without much CPU usage.

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## DaggyStyle

 *Simba7 wrote:*   

>  *DaggyStyle wrote:*   afaik, an pentium I 133mhz can be an excellent router so a setup like you want will do it, but I think a simple dual without fermi can an excellent work, not sure why you need all that power for. 
> 
> I'll be the first to admit that. My main router is a Dual PIII @ 1GHz with 512MB, my secondary router is a P200MMX with 256MB.
> 
> Of course, they both run OpenVPN. I do worry that the P200MMX would get bogged down with several VPN connections since the Dual P3 handles it without much CPU usage.

 

how many vpn connections will there be?

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## Simba7

 *DaggyStyle wrote:*   

> how many vpn connections will there be?

 

Around 10.

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## DaggyStyle

 *Simba7 wrote:*   

>  *DaggyStyle wrote:*   how many vpn connections will there be? 
> 
> Around 10.

 

I think that to be on the safe side, a e8400 will do the trick and not fermi.

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## xibo

answering your original question: yes, your fermi should be able to route 10GBaseT links' traffic. I'm routing 1GBaseT with a dual core atom, with snort and tc running, without too much issues, and yes, it's running at 1GBit/sec ( thanks to being forwarding NFS ). I also can confirm that a Pentium Pro can Route 100BaseT.

There are no 100GBaseT adapters because it's not needed. Your problem is somewhere else if you require some.

Also i think VPN isn't such a crazy performance hog, as it's just cipher + nat right? you can find hardware to offload the ciphering part and the nat which can also be offloaded is cheap anyway. I've seen Cisco's routers handling 1000+ VPN connections at once and they have way less then 1GHz.

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