Improving the performance of bandwidth-demanding applications by a distributed network interface

Abstract

In the last years, the market is demanding (scientific, multimedia, real-time, etc.) applications with high bandwidth requirements. To support this, the bandwidth of the network links has increased to reach multiple gigabit per second. Nevertheless, taking advantage of multigigabit per second links requires a lot of processor cycles for communication tasks, diminishing the processor cyles that remains available for the application. Actual multiprocessor and multicore architectures as well as programmable NICs (Network Interface Cards) provide new opportunities to exploit the parallelism, distributing the communication overhead across the processors available in the node. We have designed a network interface that takes advantage of the different processors available in the node. In this paper, the advantages of this optimized network interface are shown by analyzing the performance of a web server application. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.