Compatibility enhancement and performance measurement for socket interface with PCIe interconnections
Cheol Shim, Rupali Kiran Shinde, Min Choi · Human-centric Computing and Information Sciences · 2019
Abstract Today the key technology of high-performance computing systems is the emergence of interconnect technology that makes multiple computers into one computer cluster. This technique is a general method in which each constituent node processes its own operation and communicates with different nodes. Therefore, a high-performance network has been required. InfiniBand and Gigabit Ethernet technologies are typical examples of high-performance network. As an alternative to those technologies the development of interconnection technology using PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe or PCI-e, is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard, which has characteristics of high speed, low power, and high protocol efficiency is actively under development. In a high-performance network, the TCP/IP protocol consumes CPU resources and memory bandwidth by nature, which is a bottleneck. In this paper, we implement the PCIe based interconnection network system with low latency, low power, RDMA, and other characteristics. We utilize Socket API which is mainly used in the user-level application program rather than the existing MPI and PGAS model interfaces. The implemented PCIe interconnection network system was measured with the metrics as the bandwidth using the Iperf Benchmark which uses the Socket API. The bandwidth at 4 Mbyte of transmission data size was measured to be 1084 Mbyte/s bandwidth based on PCIe, which is about 96 times higher than that of 11.2 Mbyte/s bandwidth based on Ethernet.