Network-friendly workstations
Bruce S. Davie · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1995
The end-node, comprising host computer and network adaptor, presents one of the key obstacles to true gigabit networking, defined as the ability to deliver a gigabit per second of data to an application. Drawing on the experience of the AURORA gigabit testbed and the OSIRIS network adaptor, this paper focuses on the performance problems created or exacerbated by the architecture of the host computer. We find that workstation architecture is often hostile to the achievement of high networking performance, and propose some approaches to making workstation architecture more 'network friendly'. In addition, since benchmarks are one of the criteria that drive worstation architecture, we propose some ways to create benchmarks that will take networking performance, an increasingly important aspect of host performance, into account.