Protocols Aboard Network Interface Cards
C. Beauduy, Riccardo Bettati · 1999
Traditional host-resident protocol stacks are burdensome and often fail to keep pace with today's high-speed network data movement. With the PANIC system (Protocols Aboard Network Interface Cards), we explore shifting all or part of the protocol processing to the network interface card (NIC). Our system allows us to deploy user-level protocols, or portions thereof, across a collection of machines. We have implemented a first prototype of PANIC over Myrinet, and experiments show the feasibility and efficiency of this approach. Key Words: Network interface, protocol composition, networks-of-workstations, Myrinet. 1 Introduction As the performance provided by networking technologies dramatically increases, solutions for high-performance finegrained distributed computing start to emerge. Computing based on clusters, or on networks of workstations, greatly increases the performance of a variety of applications at low costs [1, 2, 3, 4]. The performance of such clusters relies heavily on l...