General Bypass Architectures for High-Performance Distributed Applications
C. Murray Woodside, G. Raghunath · 1996
End-system performance limits are a barrier to achieving many of the planned applications for high-speed networks. We seek architectural principles for designing the end-system software which will make it easier to achieve high throughput and low delay. A bypass architecture, previously applied to protocol stacks, is generalized in this paper to any application which handles large volumes of information at a high rate. It is necessary to consider the applications as well as the protocol stack, to avoid having the processing bottleneck simply reappear at the higher level. The resulting architecture is modular, with attachments for bypass paths which traverse the system. The performance and workload impact of a bypass-based architecture may be dramatic.