Cut-Through Delivery in Trapeze: An Exercise in Low-Latency Messaging

New network technology continues to improve both the latency and bandwidth of communication in computer clusters. The fastest high-speed networks approach or exceed the I/O bus bandwidths of “gigabitready” hosts. These advances introduce new considerations for the design of network interfaces and messaging systems for low-latency communication. This paper investigates cut-through delivery, a technique for overlapping host I/O DMA transfers with network traversal. Cut-through delivery significantly reduces end-to-end latency of large messages, which are often critical for application performance. We have implemented cut-through delivery in Trapeze, a new messaging substrate for network memory and other distributedoperating system services. Our current Trapeze prototype is capable of demand-fetching 8K virtual memory pages in 200s across a Myrinet cluster of DEC AlphaStations.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: HPDC
• Authors: Ken Yocum, Jeffrey S. Chase, Andrew J. Gallatin, Alvin R. Lebeck
• Keywords: Cut-through Delivery, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Host I/o Dma, HPDC 1997, I/O Bus Bandwidths