VIA Communication Performance on a Gigabit Ethernet Cluster

As the technology for high-speedne tworks has evolvedo ver the last decade, the interconnection of commodity computers (e.g., PCs andw orkstations) at gigabit rates has become a reality. However, the improvedp erformance of high-speedne tworks has not been matcheds o far by a proportional improvement in the ability of the TCP/IP protocol stack. As a result the Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA) was developed to remedy this situation by providing a lightweight communication protocol that bypasses operating system interaction, providing low latency and high bandwidth communications for cluster computing. In this paper, we evaluate andc ompare the performance characteristics of both hardware (Giganet) and software (M-VIA) implementations of VIA. In particular, we focus on the performance of the VIA send/receive synchronization mechanism on both uniprocessor andd ual processor systems. The tests were conducted on a Linux cluster of PCs connected by a Gigabit Ethernet network. The performance statistics were collected using a local version of NetPIPE adapted for VIA.

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