Abstract
Standard user-level networking architecture such as Virtual Interface (VI) Architecture enables distributed applications to perform low overhead communication over System Area Networks (SANs). This paper describes how high-level communication paradigms like stream sockets and remote procedure call (RPC) can be efficiently built over user-level networking architectures. To evaluate performance benefits for standard client-server and multi-threaded environments, our focus is on off-the-shelf sockets and RPC interfaces and commercially available VI Architecture based SANs. The key design techniques developed in this research include credit-based flow control, decentralized user-level protocol processing, caching of pinned communication buffers, and deferred processing of completed send operations. The one-way bandwidth achieved by stream sockets over VI Architecture was 3 to 4 times better than the same achieved by running legacy protocols over the same interconnect. On the same SAN, high-performance stream sockets and RPC over VI Architecture achieve significantly better (between 2-3x) latency than conventional stream sockets and RPC over standard network protocols in Windows NTTM 4.0 environment. Furthermore, our high-performance RPC transparently improved the network performance of Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) by a factor of 2 to 3.
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Shah, H.V., Pu, C., Madukkarumukumana, R.S. (1999). High Performance Sockets and RPC over Virtual Interface (VI) Architecture. In: Sivasubramaniam, A., Lauria, M. (eds) Network-Based Parallel Computing. Communication, Architecture, and Applications. CANPC 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1602. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/10704826_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/10704826_7
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