QoS provisioning in clusters: An investigation of router and NIC design Conference Paper uri icon

abstract

  • Design of high performance cluster networks (routers) with Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantees is becoming increasingly important to support a variety of multimedia applications, many of which have real-time constraints. Most commercial routers, which are based on the wormhole-switching paradigm, can deliver high performance, but lack QoS provisioning. In this paper, we present a pipelined wormhole router architecture that can provide high and predictable performance for integrated traffic in clusters. We consider two different implementationsa non-preemptive model and a more aggressive preemptive model. We also present the design of a network interface card (NIC) based on the Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA) design paradigm to support QoS in the NIC. The QoS capable router and NIC designs are evaluated with a mixed workload consisting of best-effort traffic, multimedia streams, and control traffic. Simulation results of an 8-port router and a (2 2) mesh network indicate that the preemptive router can provide better performance than the non-preemptive router for dynamically changing workloads. Co-evaluation of the QoS-aware NIC with the proposed router models shows significant performance improvement compared to that with a traditional NIC without any QoS support.

published proceedings

  • 28TH ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE, PROCEEDINGS

altmetric score

  • 3

author list (cited authors)

  • Yum, K. H., Kim, E. J., & Das, C. R.

citation count

  • 6

complete list of authors

  • Yum, KH||Kim, EJ||Das, CR

publication date

  • January 2001