Supporting iWARP Compatibility and Features for Regular Network Adapters

With several recent initiatives in the protocol offloading technology present on network adapters, the user market is now distributed amongst various technology levels including regular Ethernet network adapters, TCP Offload Engines (TOEs) and the recently introduced iWARP-capable networks. While iWARPcapable networks provide all the features provided by their predecessors (TOEs and regular Ethernet network adapters) and a new richer programming interface, they lack with respect to backward compatibility. In this aspect, two important issues need to be considered. First, not all network adapters support iWARP; thus, software compatibility for regular network adapters (which have no offloaded protocol stack) with iWARP capable network adapters needs to be achieved. Second, several applications on top of regular Ethernet as well as TOE based adapters have been written with the sockets interface; rewriting such applications using the new iWARP interface is cumbersome and impractical. Thu...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: CLUSTER
• Authors: Pavan Balaji, Hyun-Wook Jin, Karthikeyan Vaidyanathan, Dhabaleswar K. Panda
• Keywords: CLUSTER 2005, Cluster Computing, Ethernet Network Adapters, Network Adapters, Regular Ethernet