High-Performance I/O and Networking Software in Sequoia 2000
Joseph C. Pasquale, Eric W. Anderson, Kevin Fall, Jonathan Kay · 1995
We describe our experiences producing high-speed network and I/O software in the Sequoia 2000 Project. The efficient movement of very large objects, from tens to hundreds of megabytes in size, is a key requirement for Sequoia distributed applications. We present new designs and implementations of operating system I/O software. Our methods provide significant performance improvements for transfers among devices, processes, and between the two. We describe techniques that reduce or eliminate costly memory accesses, avoid unnecessary processing, and bypass system overheads to improve throughput while reducing latency. 1.0 Introduction In the Sequoia 2000 project, we addressed the problem of designing a distributed computer system that can efficiently retrieve, store, and transfer very large data objects. By "very large", we mean data objects in excess of tens or even hundreds of megabytes (MB). Sequoia 2000 chose Earth science as an application area because of its massive computational r...