Evaluation of Network Interface Controller on DIMMnet-2 Prototype Board

By recent performance improvement of interconnection networks for a PC cluster, standard I/O bus which connects network interface becomes the performance bottleneck. DIMMnet is a network interface which can solve the problem by using the memory bus instead of PCI bus or other I/O buses. The second generation network interface DIMMnet-2 can be connected with DDR-SDRAM slot by using the indirect accessing to memory and buffers. Although the current board is a prototype using an FPGA, the latency for 8 Bytes data transfer is only 0.441µs.