The design of nectar: a network backplane for heterogeneous multicomputers
ASPLOS III Proceedings of the third international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
Performance of the Firefly RPC
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)
Protocol implementation on the Nectar Communication Processor
SIGCOMM '90 Proceedings of the ACM symposium on Communications architectures & protocols
Computer
The interaction of architecture and operating system design
ASPLOS IV Proceedings of the fourth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
Parallelizing a new class of large applications over high-speed networks
PPOPP '91 Proceedings of the third ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming
Network-based multicomputers: an emerging parallel architecture
Proceedings of the 1991 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
Analyzing communication latency using the Nectar communication processor
SIGCOMM '92 Conference proceedings on Communications architectures & protocols
The structuring of systems using upcalls
Proceedings of the tenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
User-Process Communication Performance in Networks of Computers
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
An analysis of TCP processing overhead
IEEE Communications Magazine
| Hi-index | 0.24 |
For multicomputer applications, the most important performance parameter of a network is the latency for short messages. In this paper, we present an analysis of communication latency using measurement of the Nectar system. Nectar is a high performance multicomputer built around a high bandwidth crosspoint network. Nodes are connected to the Nectar network using network coprocessors that are primarily responsible for the protocol processing, but which can also execute application code. This architecture allows us to analyse message latency both between workstations with an outboard protocol engine and between lightweight nodes with a minimal runtime system and a fast, simple network interface (the coprocessors). We study how much context switching, buffer management and protocol processing contribute to the communication latency, and discuss how the latency is influenced by the protocol's implementation. We also discuss and analyse two other network performance measures: communication overhead and throughput.