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Concerns about guaranteed forward progress and high performance can be addressed in a networking device. Guaranteed progress is provided by proper queuing, buffer quota, and interrupt strategies. High performance is provided by efficient multicast, constant-time address searches, and minimized cache refills from main memory. The GIGAswitch is an extensible, scalable networking platform. It is a bridge connected to many high-speed FDDI LANs, and it can be extended to additional media types through additional types of line cards. Its role in the network can be extended through software upgrades. The GIGAswitch is physically scalable by allowing a few or many line cards to be inserted. This physical scalability leads to effective network bandwidth scalability because crossbar switching technology allows cards to communicate in parallel without contending for a single shared bus. The GIGAswitch crossbar provides a maximum of 34 ports to connect to external networks. Organizations that need to increase their network bandwidth by more than a factor of 34 can use a collection of GIGAswitch systems to do so. The switch control processor is one kind of card that plugs into the GIGAswitch, and it has the special role of specifying to the rest of the box how packets are to be processed. The SCP is a high-performance, general-purpose processing engine