Title :
QoS provisioning in clusters: an investigation of router and NIC design
Author :
Yum, Ki Hwan ; Kim, Eun Jung ; Das, Chita R.
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Comput. Sci. & Eng., Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park, PA, USA
Abstract :
Design of high performance cluster networks (routers) with Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantees is becoming increasingly important to support a variety of multimedia applications, many of which have real-time constraints. Most commercial routers, which are based on the wormhole-switching paradigm, can deliver high performance, but lack QoS provisioning. In this paper we present a pipelined wormhole router architecture that can provide high and predictable performance for integrated traffic in clusters. We consider two different implementations-a non-preemptive model and a more aggressive preemptive model. We also present the design of a network interface card (NIC) based on the Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA) design paradigm to support QoS in the NIC. The QoS capable router and NIC designs are evaluated with a mixed workload consisting of best-effort traffic, multimedia streams, and control traffic. Simulation results of an 8-port router and a (2×2) mesh network indicate that the preemptive router can provide better performance than the non-preemptive router for dynamically changing workloads. Co-evaluation of the QoS-aware NIC with the proposed router models shows significant performance improvement compared to that with a traditional NIC without any QoS support
Keywords :
multimedia systems; multiprocessor interconnection networks; workstation clusters; NIC design; QoS guarantees; QoS provisioning; cluster networks; clusters; commercial routers; control traffic; multimedia applications; multimedia streams; pipelined wormhole router architecture; real-time constraints; router; routers; simulation results; wormhole-switching paradigm; Bandwidth; Bit rate; Communication system traffic control; Delay; Intelligent networks; Network interfaces; Quality of service; Streaming media; Telecommunication traffic; Traffic control;
Conference_Titel :
Computer Architecture, 2001. Proceedings. 28th Annual International Symposium on
Conference_Location :
Goteborg
Print_ISBN :
0-7695-1162-7
DOI :
10.1109/ISCA.2001.937441