Designing Efficient Java Communications on Clusters
IPDPS '05 Proceedings of the 19th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS'05) - Workshop 5 - Volume 06
High Performance Sockets over Kernel Level Virtual Interface Architecture
HPCASIA '05 Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on High-Performance Computing in Asia-Pacific Region
The Journal of Supercomputing
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This paper describes GMSOCKS, a thin software layer that maps standard Windows socket calls onto Myrinet. GMSOCKS enables existing distributed applications, such as distributed databases and client server applications, that are based on TCP/IP, to transparently benefit from the performance of a System Area Network like Myrinet. No modification of the source code has to be made, nor is it required to relink or recompile the application. Our results show and order of magnitude performance improvement over Fast Ethernet is possible. The roundtrip latency for a given application decreases from 620 usec to 50 usec, while the bandwidth can be boosted from 7MB/s to 101 MB/s. As a key improvement to existing TCP/IP drivers over SANs, the new technique reduces the CPU overhead by replacing the TCP/IP protocol with a small buffer management implementation using a reliable low level API. The GMSOCKS implementation achieves approximately 74 per cent of the raw performance of the low level SAN API.