Experiences with a high-speed network adaptor: a software perspective
SIGCOMM '94 Proceedings of the conference on Communications architectures, protocols and applications
U-Net: a user-level network interface for parallel and distributed computing
SOSP '95 Proceedings of the fifteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
Coherent network interfaces for fine-grain communication
ISCA '96 Proceedings of the 23rd annual international symposium on Computer architecture
TNet: A Reliable System Area Network
IEEE Micro
The Virtual Interface Architecture
IEEE Micro
Protected, user-level DMA for the SHRIMP network interface
HPCA '96 Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture
Design and evaluation of network interfaces for system area networks
Design and evaluation of network interfaces for system area networks
Data Locality Exploitation in the Decomposition of Regular Domain Problems
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
Queue pair IP: a hybrid architecture for system area networks
ISCA '02 Proceedings of the 29th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Message Passing Evaluation and Analysis on Cray T3E and SGI Origin 2000 Systems
Euro-Par '99 Proceedings of the 5th International Euro-Par Conference on Parallel Processing
Active Memory Processor: A Hardware Garbage Collector for Real-Time Java Embedded Devices
IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
Engineering a user-level TCP for the CLAN network
NICELI '03 Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network-I/O convergence: experience, lessons, implications
Performance Analysis of System Overheads in TCP/IP Workloads
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques
Integrated network interfaces for high-bandwidth TCP/IP
Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
| Hi-index | 4.13 |
A barrier to delivering improvements in network bandwidth and latency to users is the network interface (NI), which connects a network to the host computer that runs the network software. An NI includes hardware that exposes an internal interface-such as device registers- to a host processor. A key problem with most current NIs is that their internal interface is similar to that of a disk's interface. Because of such limitations, current NIs will not be adequate for use with newer, high-performance networks and host computers. High-performance local area networks have advanced so far that some view them as a new class of networks called system area networks (SANs). Emerging SANs deliver bandwidths of 10 Gbps or more and latencies of tens of nanoseconds-two to four orders of magnitude better than that delivered by most current LANs. New hosts demand much higher performance. If NIs do not adapt to these changes they will become a barrier to improving network performance. To solve this problem, future NIs should appear to their hosts more like memory than like disk interfaces. The authors argue that treating NI accesses like memory accesses is justified by the importance of network performance to future computers.