A One-Man-Year Exercise in Network Interface
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 granula...
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Format: | Text |
Language: | English |
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1998
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Online Access: | http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.18.6778 http://www.lcs.mit.edu/publications/pubs/ps/MIT-LCS-TM-406.ps.gz |
Summary: | 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. |
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