Sockets direct protocol for hybrid network stacks: a case study with iWARP over 10G Ethernet

  • Authors:
  • Pavan Balaji;Sitha Bhagvat;Rajeev Thakur;Dhabaleswar K. Panda

  • Affiliations:
  • Math. and Comp. Sci., Argonne Natl. Lab;Scalable Systems Group, Dell Inc.;Math. and Comp. Sci., Argonne Natl. Lab;Computer Science and Engg., Ohio State University

  • Venue:
  • HiPC'08 Proceedings of the 15th international conference on High performance computing
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

As high-end computing systems continue to grow, the needfor advanced networking capabilities, such as hot-spot avoidance andfault tolerance, is becoming important. While the traditional approachof utilizing intelligent network hardware has worked well to achieve highperformance, adding more and more features makes the hardware complexand expensive. Consequently, protocol stacks such as iWARP andMX for 10-Gigabit Ethernet and QLogic InfiniBand, utilize hybridhardware-software designs that take advantage of the processing powerof multi-core processors together with network hardware accelerators.However, upper-layer stacks on these networks, such as the Sockets DirectProtocol (SDP), have not kept pace with such shift in paradigm,and have continued to assume complete hardware offload, leading to redundantfeatures and performance loss. In this paper, we propose anenhanced design for SDP that allows network stacks to specify componentsimplemented in hardware and software, and uses this informationto optimize its execution.