Performance characterization of a 10-Gigabit Ethernet TOE

Though traditional Ethernet based network architectures such as Gigabit Ethernet have suffered from a huge performance difference as compared to other high performance networks (e.g, InfiniBand, Quadrics, Myrinet), Ethernet has continued to be the most widely used network architecture today. This trend is mainly attributed to the low cost of the network components and their backward compatibility with the existing Ethernet infrastructure. With the advent of 10-Gigabit Ethernet and TCP offload engines (TOEs), whether this performance gap be bridged is an open question. In this paper, we present a detailed performance evaluation of the Chelsio T110 10-Gigabit Ethernet adapter with TOE. We have done performance evaluations in three broad categories: (i) detailed micro-benchmark performance evaluation at the sockets layer, (ii) performance evaluation of the message passing interface (MPI) stack atop the sockets interface, and (iii) application-level evaluations using the Apache Web server. Our experimental results demonstrate latency as low as 8.9 μs and throughput of nearly 7.6 Gbps for these adapters. Further, we see an order-of-magnitude improvement in the performance of the Apache Web server while utilizing the TOE as compared to the basic 10-Gigabit Ethernet adapter without TOE.