Flash memory performance on a highly scalable IOV system
Peter N. Kirkpatrick, Adel Alsaadi, Purnachandar Mididuddi, Prakash Chauhan, Afshin Daghi, Daniel Kim, Sang Kim, K. R. Kishor, Paritosh Kulkarni, Michael J. Lyons, Kiran Malwankar, Hemanth Ravi, S. Saikumar, M. S. Subramanian, Marimuthu Thangaraj, Arvind Vasudev, Vinay Venkataraghavan, Carl Yang, Wilson Yang · 2011
We present an enterprise-class I/O virtualization (IOV) system, discuss the architecture, and share performance characterization results using extremely high performance flash memory as a load generator. This work describes an IOV system built on the PCI-Express over Ethernet (PCIeOE) protocol, which combines these two ubiquitous, standardized technologies in a novel fashion. By preserving the PCI-Express (PCIe) device and software model, computers interface to the system without modifications to hardware or software. By utilizing 10G Ethernet as a transport, the system integrates with enterprise environments, achieves very high scalability and benefits from the favorable economics of the Ethernet ecosystem. Further, we present a thorough characterization of the latency and performance of the system using very high performance flash memory as an endpoint device. Flash memory serves as a high-intensity traffic generator, and also represents a compelling application of the PCIeOE technology.