Architecture and performance of dynamic offloader for cluster network

Abstract

This paper presents an architecture of the dynamic offloading mechanism, called Maestro Dynamic Offloading Mechanism(MDO), for the intelligent cluster network Maestro2. By using MDO, programmers can offload software modules to the network interface and the switch dynamically. MDO provides programmers functional APIs with which programmers can develop offload modules efficiently. MDO also includes wrapper library that enables the offload modules to be executed on the host processors as well as on the network devices. The results of performance evaluation showed that the performance of the collective communications can be improved by offloading communication procedures to the network devices using MDO. The overhead of the MDO and the traffic on PCI bus are also discussed.