Efficient Buffer Management for Retry Mechanism in InfiniBand

InfiniBand architecture (IBA) is the next generation interconnection technology. IBA is designed around a point-to-point switched I/O fabric, whereby end node devices are interconnected by cascaded switch device. IBA defines hardware transport protocols sufficient to support both reliable messaging and memory manipulation semantics without software intervention in the data movement path. In this paper, the authors propose efficient buffer management for retry mechanism in InfiniBand. IBA end nodes communicate with other end node based on queue pair (QP) - QP consist of send queue and receive queue pair. Reliable service provides guarantee that message are delivered from a requester to a responder at most once, in order and without corruption. Retry mechanism for reliable services require additional queue space called a retry queue. The main goal of the buffer management mechanism is usage of minimum memory resource and high throughput in the limited hardware memory space. Therefore, the authors design the queue control unit (QCU) management for efficient hardware memory space. QCU manage the address pointer to adjust assigned memory space for each of queue. The simulation results show that the proposed buffer management mechanism gives the increased throughput compared to the previously proposed mechanism