Abstract: Methods and systems are described for programming a substitution of ingress replication buffering for egress replication buffering after identifying egress buffer errors (such as overflow) for multicast traffic. A network element is configured to identify which ports drop packets by monitoring egress buffers and/or multicast traffic in real time. A hardware forwarding engine provides feedback to a control plane processor of the network element to adapt and selectively reprogram multicast ingress replication, temporarily, for certain egress ports that may have, e.g., egress buffer errors or risk of issues due to high network traffic. Using virtual output queues in ingress buffers may reduce risk of egress port congestion, as egress buffers have more limited resources than ingress buffers; however, relying solely on ingress replication for multicast traffic may hinder unicast traffic. Ingress buffer replication of multicast traffic may be used selectively and temporarily.

Abstract: Methods and systems are described for programming a substitution of ingress replication buffering for egress replication buffering after identifying egress buffer errors (such as overflow) for multicast traffic. A network element is configured to identify which ports drop packets by monitoring egress buffers and/or multicast traffic in real time. A hardware forwarding engine provides feedback to a control plane processor of the network element to adapt and selectively reprogram multicast ingress replication, temporarily, for certain egress ports that may have, e.g., egress buffer errors or risk of issues due to high network traffic. Using virtual output queues in ingress buffers may reduce risk of egress port congestion, as egress buffers have more limited resources than ingress buffers; however, relying solely on ingress replication for multicast traffic may hinder unicast traffic. Ingress buffer replication of multicast traffic may be used selectively and temporarily.

Abstract: In some embodiments, the invention involves a system and method relating to software caching with bounded-error delayed updates. Embodiments of the present invention describe a delayed-update software-controlled cache, which may be used to reduce memory access latencies and improve throughput for domain specific applications that are tolerant of errors caused by delayed updates of cached values. In at least one embodiment of the present invention, software caching may be implemented by using a compiler to automatically generate caching code in application programs that must access and/or update memory. Cache is accessed for a period of time, even if global data has been updated, to delay costly memory accesses. Other embodiments are described and claimed.