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A major challenge in Internet edge router design is to supportboth high packet forwarding performance and versatile andefficient packet processing capabilities. The thesis of thisresearch project is that a cluster of PCs connected by a high-speedsystem area network provides an effective hardwareplatform for building routers to be used at the edges of theInternet. This paper describes a scalable and extensible edgerouter architecture called Panama, which supports a novelaggregate route caching scheme, a real-time link schedulingalgorithm whose performance overhead is independentof the number of real-time flows, a highly efficient kernelextension mechanism to safely load networking software extensionsdynamically, and an integrated resource schedulerwhich ensures that real-time flows with additional packetprocessing requirements still meet their end-to-end performancerequirements. This paper describes the implementationand evaluation of the first Panama prototype based on acluster of PCs and Myrinet.