Using the SimOS machine simulator to study complex computer systems
ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS)
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SIGMETRICS '02 Proceedings of the 2002 ACM SIGMETRICS international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
Messaging on Gigabit Ethernet: Some Experiments with GAMMA and Other Systems
IPDPS '01 Proceedings of the 15th International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium
Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking - Network processors
Protocol-Dependent Message-Passing Performance on Linux Clusters
CLUSTER '02 Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing
Towards a Theory of Optimal Communication Pipelines
Towards a Theory of Optimal Communication Pipelines
On the elusive benefits of protocol offload
NICELI '03 Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network-I/O convergence: experience, lessons, implications
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Performance Analysis of System Overheads in TCP/IP Workloads
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques
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High-performance IPv6 forwarding algorithm for multi-core and multithreaded network processor
Proceedings of the eleventh ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming
Exploiting NIC architectural support for enhancing IP-based protocols on high-performance networks
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HOTI '06 Proceedings of the 14th IEEE Symposium on High-Performance Interconnects
TCP offload through connection handoff
Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGOPS/EuroSys European Conference on Computer Systems 2006
Server network scalability and TCP offload
ATEC '05 Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference
TCP offload is a dumb idea whose time has come
HOTOS'03 Proceedings of the 9th conference on Hot Topics in Operating Systems - Volume 9
Studying network protocol offload with emulation: approach and preliminary results
HOTI '04 Proceedings of the High Performance Interconnects, 2004. on Proceedings. 12th Annual IEEE Symposium
Speeding up TCP/IP: faster processors are not enough
PCC '02 Proceedings of the Performance, Computing, and Communications Conference, 2002. on 21st IEEE International
Analyzing the benefits of protocol offload by full-system simulation
PDP '07 Proceedings of the 15th Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Network-Based Processing
An analysis of TCP processing overhead
IEEE Communications Magazine
Leveraging bandwidth improvements to web servers through enhanced network interfaces
The Journal of Supercomputing
System performance evaluation by combining RTC and VHDL simulation: A case study on NICs
Journal of Systems Architecture: the EUROMICRO Journal
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In the last years, diverse network interface designs have been proposed to cope with the link bandwidth increase that is shifting the communication bottleneck towards the nodes in the network. The main point behind some of these network interfaces is to reach an efficient distribution of the communication overheads among the different processing units of the node, thus leaving more host CPU cycles for the applications and other operating systems tasks. Among these proposals, protocol offloading searches for an efficient use of the processing elements in the network interface card (NIC) to free the host CPU from network processing. The lack of both, conclusive experimental results about the possible benefits and a deep understanding of the behavior of these alternatives in their different parameter spaces, have caused some controversy about the usefulness of this technique. The contributions of this paper deal with the implementation and evaluation of offloading strategies and with the need of accurate tools for researching the computer system issues that, as networking, require the analysis of interactions among applications, operating system, and hardware. Thus, in this paper, a way to include timing models in a full-system simulator (Simics) to provide a suitable tool for network subsystem simulation is proposed. Moreover, we compare two kinds of simulators, a hardware description language level simulator and a full-system simulator (including our proposed timing models), in the analysis of protocol offloading at different levels. We also explain the results obtained from the perspective of the previously described LAWS model and propose some changes in this model to get a more accurate approach to the experimental results. From these results, it is possible to conclude that offloading allows a relevant throughput improvement in some circumstances that can be qualitatively predicted by the LAWS model.