Patent ID: 8868790

Claim:
An apparatus for use with one or more external networks having links and devices, the apparatus comprising: at least one network module having one or more physical network interfaces enabled to couple with the links of the external networks; a plurality of processor-memory modules enabled to run software processes and to provide interface state to one or more of the software processes via one or more dedicated hardware registers of the processor-memory module, the interface state corresponding to a plurality of Ethernet compatible logical network interfaces; a multi-ported internally non-blocking switching fabric, each of the network modules and the processor-memory modules being coupled via point-to-point links to a respective port of the switching fabric at a respective fabric address, the switching fabric being enabled to support multiple simultaneous data exchanges between the network modules and the processor-memory modules; wherein the physical network interfaces and the Ethernet compatible logical network interfaces are enabled to selectively exchange frames among the links and the processes; wherein each network module comprises logic to cellify each switch-bound frame received by the physical network interfaces of each network module; wherein each processor-memory module comprises a plurality of physical partitions and logic to convert each switch bound frame into cells, each cell specifying a destination address corresponding to a physical partition of a destination processor-memory module and transfer each cell through the switching fabric according to the destination address; and wherein each of the network modules and the processor-memory modules comprises logic to reassemble the cells into the frame.