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

Sleepy Banks

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

Tuple Cache

Experiments

Click

timing notion

UCSB's TCAM power model

randomly generated workload

represent different types of traffic

Flow-Based Workload Generator

Simulation Methodology

Results

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