Transport layer aware design of network interface in many-core systems

In this paper we instigate the design of network interfaces which have knowledge about the transport layer and networking protocols of many-core systems. Workload dynamicity and multitasking are two main features of many-core systems, which are handled by relatively small kernels on each core. In the message-passing paradigm the kernel also acts as the transport layer interface to tasks for exchanging packets. However, the networking overhead of kernel cripples the real network performance. The proposed NI eases the networking job of kernels and reduces their performance bottleneck. This is done in the receiver side of the NI by depacketizing, storing, and retrieving transport packets in the hardware level. Simulation results show up to 4 times reduction in the network packets latency as well as up to 4.7 times enhancement in the achievable bandwidth in the transport layer. Furthermore, the worst case latency of the network gets significantly balanced, which makes the system more reliable and predictable for real-time and stream applications.