Protocol design for high performance networking: a Myrinet experience
Loı̈c Prylli, Bernard Tourancheau · HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 1997
High speed networks are now providing incredible performance. Software evolution is slow and the old protocol stacks are no longer adequate for these kind of communication speeds. When bandwidth increases, the latency should decrease as much in order to keep the system balance. With the current network technology, the main bottleneck is most often the software that is the interface between the hardware and the user. We designed and implemented new transmission protocols, targeted to parallel computing, that squeeze the most out of a high speed network (Myrinet in this paper) without wasting time in system calls or memory copies, giving all the speed to the applications. This design is presented here as well as experimental results. We achieve Gigabit/s bandwidth and less than 5us latency on a cluster of PC workstations with inexpensive network hardware. Moreover, our results compare favorably with the expensive parallel computers or ATM LANs.