A VIA-based RDMA Mechanism for High Performance PC Cluster Systems
Jung In-Hyung, Sang–Hwa Chung, Sejin Park · Jeongbo gwahaghoe nonmunji. si'seu'tem mich i'lon · 2004
The traditional communication protocols such as TCP/IP are not suitable for PC cluster systems because of their high software processing overhead. To eliminate this overhead, industry leaders have defined the Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA). VIA provides two different data transfer mechanisms, a traditional Send/Receive model and the Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) model. RDMA is extremely efficient way to reduce software overhead because it can bypass the OS and use the network interface controller (NIC) directly for communication, also bypass the CPU on the remote host. In this paper, we have implemented VIA-based RDMA mechanism in hardware. Compared to the traditional Send/Receive model, the RDMA mechanism improves latency and bandwidth. Our RDMA mechanism can also communicate without using remote CPU cycles. Our experimental results show a minimum latency of 12.5 and a maximum bandwidth of 95.5MB/s. As a result, our RDMA mechanism allows PC cluster systems to have a high performance communication method.