Performance analysis of system overheads in TCP/IP workloads

Current high-performance computer systems are unable to saturate the latest available high-bandwidth networks such as 10 Gigabit Ethernet. A key obstacle in achieving 10 gigabits per second is the high overhead of communication between the CPU and network interface controller (NIC), which typically resides on a standard I/O bus with high access latency. Using several network-intensive benchmarks, we investigate the impact of this overhead by analyzing the performance of hypothetical systems in which the NIC is more closely coupled to the CPU, including integration on the CPU die. We find that systems with high-latency NICs spend a significant amount of time in the device driver. NIC integration can substantially reduce this overhead, providing significant throughput benefits when other CPU processing is not a bottleneck. NIC integration also enables cache placement of DMA data. This feature has tremendous benefits when pay-loads are touched quickly, but potentially can harm performance in other situations due to cache pollution.