QoS provisioning in clusters: an investigation of Router and NIC design

  • Authors:
  • Ki Hwan Yum;Eun Jung Kim;Chita R. Das

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

  • Venue:
  • ISCA '01 Proceedings of the 28th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

Design of high performance cluster networks (routers) with Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantees is becoming increasingly important to support a variety of multimedia applications, many of which have real-time constraints. Most commercial routers, which are based on the wormhole-switching paradigm, can deliver high performance, but lack QoS provisioning. In this paper, we present a pipelined wormhole router architecture that can provide high and predictable performance for integrated traffic in clusters. We consider two different implementations—a non-preemptive model and a more aggressive preemptive model. We also present the design of a network interface card (NIC) based on the Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA) design paradigm to support QoS in the NIC. The QoS capable router and NIC designs are evaluated with a mixed workload consisting of best-effort traffic, multimedia streams, and control traffic.Simulation results of an 8-port router and a (2 × 2) mesh network indicate that the preemptive router can provide better performance than the non-preemptive router for dynamically changing workloads. Co-evaluation of the QoS-aware NIC with the proposed router models shows significant performance improvement compared to that with a traditional NIC without any QoS support.