Nothing Special   »   [go: up one dir, main page]

skip to main content
article
Free access

Evaluating design alternatives for reliable communication on high-speed networks

Published: 12 November 2000 Publication History

Abstract

We systematically evaluate the performance of five implementations of a single, user-level communication interface. Each implementation makes different architectural assumptions about the reliability of the network hardware and the capabilities of the network interface. The implementations differ accordingly in their division of protocol tasks between host software, network-interface firmware, and network hardware. Using microbenchmarks, parallel-programming systems, and parallel applications, we assess the performance impact of different protocol decompositions. We show how moving protocol tasks to a relatively slow network interface yields both performance advantages and disadvantages, depending on the characteristics of the application and the underlying parallel-programming system. In particular, we show that a communication system that assumes highly reliable network hardware and that uses network-interface support to process multicast traffic performs best for all applications.

References

[1]
S. Araki, A. Bilas, C. Dubnicki, J. Edler, K. Konishi, and J. Philbin. User-Space Communication: A Quantitative Study. In Supercomputing'98, Orlando, FL, Nov. 1998.
[2]
M. Aron and P. Druschel. Soft Timers: Efficient Microsecond Software Timer Support for Network Processing. In Proc. of the 17th Symp. on Operating Systems Principles, pp. 232- 246, Kiawah Island Resort, SC, Dec. 1999.
[3]
H. Bal, R. Bhoedjang, R. Hofman, C. Jacobs, K. Langendoen, T. Ruhl, and M. Kaashoek. Performance Evaluation of the Orca Shared Object System. ACM Trans. on Computer Systems, 16(1):1-40, Feb. 1998.
[4]
R. Bhoedjang. Communication Architectures for Parallel- Programming Systems. PhD thesis, Dept. of Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, June 2000.
[5]
R. Bhoedjang, T. Ruhl, and H. Bal. Efficient Multicast on Myrinet Using Link-Level Flow Control. In Proc. of the Int. Conf. on Parallel Processing, pp. 381-390, Minneapolis, MN, Aug. 1998.
[6]
R. Bhoedjang, T. Ruhl, and H. Bal. User-Level Network Interface Protocols. IEEE Computer, 31(11):53-60, Nov. 1998.
[7]
A. Bilas, D. Jiang, Y. Zhou, and J. Singh. Limits to the Performance of Software Shared Memory: A Layered Approach. In Proc. of the 5th Int. Symp. on High-Performance Computer Architecture, pp. 193-202, Orlando, FL, Jan. 1999.
[8]
N. Boden, D. Cohen, R. Felderman, A. Kulawik, C. Seitz, J. Seizovic, and W. Su. Myrinet: A Gigabit-per-second Local Area Network. IEEE Micro, 15(1):29-36, Feb. 1995.
[9]
B. Chun, A. Mainwaring, and D. Culler. Virtual Network Transport Protocols for Myrinet. In Hot Interconnects'97, Stanford, CA, Apr. 1997.
[10]
D. Culler, L. Liu, R. Martin, and C. Yoshikawa. Assessing Fast Network Interfaces. IEEE Micro, 16(1):35-43, February 1996.
[11]
C. Dubnicki, A. Bilas, Y. Chen, S. Damianakis, and K. Li. VMMC-2: Efficient Support for Reliable, Connection-Oriented Communication. In Hot Interconnects'97, Stanford, CA, Apr. 1997.
[12]
M. Gerla, P. Palnati, and S. Walton. Multicasting Protocols for High-Speed, Wormhole-Routing Local Area Networks. In Proc. of the 1996 Conf. on Communications Architectures, Protocols, and Applications (SIGCOMM), pp. 184-193, Stanford University, CA, Aug. 1996.
[13]
W. Gropp, E. Lusk, N. Doss, and A. Skjellum. A High- Performance, Portable Implementation of the MPI Message Passing Interface Standard. Parallel Computing, 22(6):789- 828, Sept. 1996.
[14]
Y. Huang and P. McKinley. Efficient Collective Operations with ATM Network Interface Support. In Proc. of the Int. Conf. on Parallel Processing, pp. 34-43, Bloomingdale, IL, Aug. 1996.
[15]
K. Johnson, M. Kaashoek, and D. Wallach. CRL: High- Performance All-Software Distributed Shared Memory. In Proc. of the 15th Symp. on Operating Systems Principles, pp. 213-226, Copper Mountain, CO, Dec. 1995.
[16]
V. Karamcheti and A. Chien. Software Overhead in Messaging Layers: Where Does the Time Go? In Proc. of the 6th Int. Conf. on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, pp. 51-60, San Jose, CA, Oct. 1994.
[17]
R. Kesavan and D. Panda. Optimal Multicast with Packetization and Network Interface Support. In Proc. of the Int. Conf. on Parallel Processing, pp. 370-377, Bloomingdale, IL, Aug. 1997.
[18]
A. Krishnamurthy, K. Schauser, C. Scheiman, R. Wang, D. Culler, and K. Yelick. Evaluation of Architectural Support for Global Address-Based Communication in Large-Scale Parallel Machines. In Proc. of the 7th Int. Conf. on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, pp. 37-48, Cambridge, MA, Oct. 1996.
[19]
O. Maquelin, G. Gao, H. Hum, K. Theobald, and X. Tian. Polling Watchdog: Combining Polling and Interrupts for Efficient Message Handling. In Proc. of the 23rd Int. Symp. on Computer Architecture, pp. 179-188, Philadelphia, PA, May 1996.
[20]
R. Martin, A. Vahdat, D. Culler, and T. Anderson. Effects of Communication Latency, Overhead, and Bandwidth in a Cluster Architecture. In Proc. of the 24th Int. Symp. on Computer Architecture, pp. 85-97, Denver, CO, June 1997.
[21]
D. Mosberger and L. Peterson. Careful Protocols or How to Use Highly Reliable Networks. In Proc. of the Fourth Workshop on Workstation Operating Systems, pp. 80-84, Napa, CA, Oct. 1993.
[22]
S. Pakin, M. Lauria, and A. Chien. High Performance Messaging on Workstations: Illinois Fast Messages (FM) for Myrinet. In Supercomputing '95, San Diego, CA, Dec. 1995.
[23]
J. Romein, A. Plaat, H. Bal, and J. Schaeffer. Transposition Driven Work Scheduling in Distributed Search. In AAAI National Conference, pp. 725-731, Orlando, FL, July 1999.
[24]
H. Tezuka, A. Hori, Y. Ishikawa, and M. Sato. PM: An Operating System Coordinated High-Performance Communication Library. In High-Performance Computing and Networking (LNCS 1225), pp. 708-717, Vienna, Austria, Apr. 1997.
[25]
K. Verstoep, K. Langendoen, and H. Bal. Efficient Reliable Multicast on Myrinet. In Proc. of the Int. Conf. on Parallel Processing, pp. 156-165, Bloomingdale, IL, Aug. 1996.
[26]
T. von Eicken, A. Basu, V. Buch, and W. Vogels. U-Net: A User-Level Network Interface for Parallel and Distributed Computing. In Proc. of the 15th Symp. on Operating Systems Principles, pp. 303-316, Copper Mountain, CO, Dec. 1995.

Recommendations

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review
ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review  Volume 34, Issue 5
Dec. 2000
269 pages
ISSN:0163-5980
DOI:10.1145/384264
Issue’s Table of Contents
  • cover image ACM Conferences
    ASPLOS IX: Proceedings of the ninth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
    November 2000
    271 pages
    ISBN:1581133170
    DOI:10.1145/378993
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 12 November 2000
Published in SIGOPS Volume 34, Issue 5

Check for updates

Qualifiers

  • Article

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)117
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)25
Reflects downloads up to 05 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Login options

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media