Design challenges of virtual networks: fast, general-purpose communication

  • Authors:
  • Alan M. Mainwaring;David E. Culler

  • Affiliations:
  • Computer Science Division, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA;Computer Science Division, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the seventh ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

Virtual networks provide applications with the illusion of having their own dedicated, high-performance networks, although network interfaces posses limited, shared resources. We present the design of a large-scale virtual network system and examine the integration of communication programming interface, system resource management, and network interface operation. Our implementation on a cluster of 100 workstations quantifies the impact of virtualization on small message latencies and throughputs, shows full hardware performance is delivered to dedicated applications and time-shared workloads, and shows robust performance under demanding workloads that overcommit interface resources.