Architectural Support for Managing Communication in Point-to-Point Distributed Systems

Point-to-point networks provide a natural platform for distributed systems due to their high bandwidth, scalability, and the potential for exploiting communication locality. Managing these networks, however, is complicated by the disparate quality-of-service requirements of distributed applications. Since the various routing and switching schemes are best-suited for diierent classes of traac, the network adapter should be able to dynamically tailor them according to the current need. In this paper, we present and evaluate SPIDER (Scalable Point-to-point Interface DrivER), a network adapter that supports a variety of routing and switching schemes, and includes means for dynamically selecting between them. By exercising low-level control over each network link, SPIDER exploits concurrency amongst the links to reduce both packet latency and intrusion on the protocol software. We evaluate a mesh of SPIDERs through cycle-level simulations over a range of routing and switching schemes. We also demonstrate how this architecture can dynamically partition network bandwidth to meet the performance requirements of disparate traac classes.