Active messages: a mechanism for integrated communication and computation
ISCA '92 Proceedings of the 19th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
U-Net: a user-level network interface for parallel and distributed computing
SOSP '95 Proceedings of the fifteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
High performance messaging on workstations: Illinois fast messages (FM) for Myrinet
Supercomputing '95 Proceedings of the 1995 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
Virtual-Memory-Mapped Network Interfaces
IEEE Micro
Shrimp Project Update: Myrinet Communication
IEEE Micro
The Virtual Interface Architecture
IEEE Micro
Scalability of the microsoft cluster service
WINSYM'98 Proceedings of the 2nd conference on USENIX Windows NT Symposium - Volume 2
Building reliable, high-performance communication systems from components
Proceedings of the seventeenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
ICS '01 Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Supercomputing
QoS provisioning in clusters: an investigation of Router and NIC design
ISCA '01 Proceedings of the 28th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Dynamic memory management for programmable devices
Proceedings of the 3rd international symposium on Memory management
Euro-Par '02 Proceedings of the 8th International Euro-Par Conference on Parallel Processing
IEEE Transactions on Computers
A high-performance network monitoring platform for intrusion detection
ICOIN'05 Proceedings of the 2005 international conference on Information Networking: convergence in broadband and mobile networking
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To provide a faster path between applications and the network, most researchers have advocated removing the operating system kernel and its centralized networking stack from the critical path and creating a user-level network interface. With these interfaces, designers can tailor the communication layers each process uses to the demands of that process. Consequently, applications can send and receive network packets without operating system intervention, which greatly decreases communication latency and increases network throughput. Unfortunately, the diversity of approaches and lack of consensus has stalled progress in refining research results into products-a prerequisite to the widespread adoption of these interfaces. Recently, however, Intel, Microsoft, and Compaq have introduced the Virtual Interface Architecture, an emerging standard for cluster or system-area networks. Products based on the VIA have already surfaced, notably GigaNet's GNN1000 network interface. As more products appear, research into application- level issues can proceed and the technology of user-level network interfaces should mature. Several prototypes-among them Cornell University's U-Net2-have heavily influenced the VIA. In this article, we describe the architectural issues and design trade-offs at the core of these prototype designs.