User Customization of Virtual Network Interfaces with U-Net/SLE

We describe U-Net/SLE (Safe Language Extensions), a user-level network interface architecture which enables per-application customization of communication semantics through downloading of user extension applets, implemented as Java classfiles, to the network interface. This architecture permits applications to safely specify code to be executed within the NI on message transmission and reception. By leveraging the existing U-Net model, applications may implement protocol code at the user level, within the NI, or using some combination of the two. Our current implementation, using the Myricom Myrinet interface and a small Java Virtual Machine subset, obtains good performance, allowing host communication overhead to be reduced and improving the overlap of communication and computation during protocol processing.

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