SOVIA: A User-level Sockets Layer Over Virtual Interface Architecture

The Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA) is an industry standard user-level communication architecture for system area networks. The VIA provides a protected, directlyaccessible interface to a network hardware, removing the operating system from the critical communication path. In this paper, we design and implement a user-level Sockets layer over VIA, named SOVIA (Sockets Over VIA). Our objective is to use the SOVIA layer to accelerate the existing Sockets-based applications with a reasonable effort and to provide a portable and high performance communication library based on VIA to the application developers. SOVIA realizes comparable performance to native VIA, showing the minimum latency of 10.5 sec and the peak bandwidth of 814Mbps on Giganet's cLAN. We have verified the functional compatibility with the existing Sockets API by porting FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and RPC (Remote Procedure Call) applications over the SOVIA layer. Compared to the Giganet's LANE driver whi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: CLUSTER
• Authors: Jin-Soo Kim, Kangho Kim, Sung-In Jung
• Keywords: CLUSTER 2001, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Sockets Over VIA, SOVIA Layer, User-level Communication Architecture