On a NIC's operating system, schedulers and high-performance networking applications

Yaron Weinsberg*, Tal Anker, Danny Dolev, Scott Kirkpatrick

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Two critical issues impact the overall performance of Linux clusters based on Intel servers: inter-process communication latency and data throughput. Underlying both of these performance challenges is the inefficient use of computational power and server CPU cycles to process the network protocols. Today's modern high-end Network Interface Cards (NICs) are equipped with an onboard CPU. In most cases, these CPU's are only used by the vendor and are operated by a proprietary OS, which makes them inaccessible to the HPC application developer. In this paper we present a design and implementation of a framework for building high-performance networking applications. The framework consists of an embedded NIC Operating System with a specialized scheduler. The main challenge in developing such a scheduler is the lack of a preemption mechanism in most high-end NICs. Our scheduler provides finer-grained schedules than the alternatives. We have implemented several network applications, and were able to increase their throughput while decreasing the host's CPU utilization.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationHigh Performance Computing and Communications - Second International Conference, HPCC 2006, Proceedings
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages380-389
Number of pages10
ISBN (Print)3540393684, 9783540393689
DOIs
StatePublished - 2006
Event2nd International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications, HPCC 2006 - Munich, Germany
Duration: 13 Sep 200615 Sep 2006

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume4208 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference2nd International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications, HPCC 2006
Country/TerritoryGermany
CityMunich
Period13/09/0615/09/06

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