Sockets direct protocol for hybrid network stacks: A case study with iWARP over 10G ethernet

Abstract

As high-end computing systems continue to grow, the need for advanced networking capabilities, such as hot-spot avoidance and fault tolerance, is becoming important. While the traditional approach of utilizing intelligent network hardware has worked well to achieve high performance, adding more and more features makes the hardware complex and expensive. Consequently, protocol stacks such as iWARP and MX for 10-Gigabit Ethernet and QLogic InfiniBand, utilize hybrid hardware-software designs that take advantage of the processing power of multi-core processors together with network hardware accelerators. However, upper-layer stacks on these networks, such as the Sockets Direct Protocol (SDP), have not kept pace with such shift in paradigm, and have continued to assume complete hardware offload, leading to redundant features and performance loss. In this paper, we propose an enhanced design for SDP that allows network stacks to specify components implemented in hardware and software, and uses this information to optimize its execution. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.