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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.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.6 Internetworking
          Subjects: Routers

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS

  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.6 SIMULATION AND MODELING

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Measurement, Performance, Theory

Keywords:
VirtualClock, cluster network, network interface, preemption mechanism, quality-of-service, router architecture, wormhole router