MyVIA: a design and implementation of the high performance Virtual Interface Architecture

Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA) established a communication model with low latency and high bandwidth, and defined the standard of user-level high-performance communication specification in cluster systems. This paper analyzes the current development, principle and implementations of VIA, and presents user-level high-performance communication software, MyVIA, based on Myrinet, which is comfortable with VIA specification. The paper first describes the design principle and framework of MyVIA, then proposes new technologies of MyVIA including User TLB, continued host physical memory and varied NIC buffer, the pipelining communication based on resource and DMA chain, and physical descriptor ring. Experimental results of performance comparisons and analysis are presented; the one-way bandwidth of MyVIA for a 4 KB message is 250 MB/s, and the lowest one-way latency is 8.46 μs, which shows that the performance of MyVIA surpassed that of other implementations of VIA.