StarT-X: A One-Man-Year Exercise in Network Interface Engineering

• Main Authors: One-Man-Year Exercise In, James C. Hoe
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 1998
• Subjects: Arctic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.1.9958; http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~jhoe/./distribution/mit/csgmemo/memo-406.ps

This paper presents the StarT-X PCI card, a network interface unit for the Arctic Switch Fabric[4]. StarT-X provides a user-level hardware interface for message passing on a cluster of PCI-equipped host platforms. StarT-X supports three message-passing mechanisms that are tuned for different granularities of communication. On a SUN E5000 with StarT-X, a processor can send and receive a 64-byte message in less than 0.4 and 3.5 usec respectively and incur less than 5.6 usec user-to-user latency. StarT-X's remote memory-to-memory DMA mechanism can transfer large data blocks at over 60 MByte/sec on SUN E5000's. StarT-X's hardware was developed in just over a year by a one-man team. StarT-X and Arctic are currently installed on MIT/LCS's Xolas Cluster of SUN E5000's and support MPI[15] and Cilk[18] programming interfaces. The performance of these high-level programming interfaces and a numerical application, MITMatlab[12], are reported.