High Performance Systems and Interconnects

Nowadays, the increasing development of network subsystems in cluster and high performance computing has shifted the main concern surrounding data transfer; the bottleneck of cluster communication no longer lies in the network architecture, but rather in the latency induced by the operating system. Recent years research has demonstrated that user-level networking can overcome traditional networking schemes (found in clusters) that demand high CPU usage and large memory consumption. High speed interconnects that utilize low-level message passing system software allow userspace networking to minimize the use of host memory bandwidth and increase the speed of data transfer schemes. In order to achieve high speed user-level data exchange between cluster nodes, one has to account for different i/o architectures in systems software (such as modern network interfaces running custom firmware that drives data through shorter paths in the memory hierarchy subsystem).

Publications

• E. Koukis, A. Nanos and N. Koziris, “Synchronized Send Operations for Efficient Streaming Block I/O over Myrinet,” Proceedings of the Workshop on Communication Architecture for Clusters (CAC 2008), held in conjunction with the 22nd International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2008), Miami, FL, USA, 14-18 April, 2008, to appear
• E. Koukis and N. Koziris, “Efficient Block Device Sharing over Myrinet with Memory Bypass,” Proceedings of the 21th International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2007), p. 29, Long Beach, CA, USA, 26-30 March, 2007
• E. Koukis and N. Koziris, “Memory and Network Bandwidth Aware Scheduling of Multiprogrammed Workloads on Clusters of SMPs,” Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems (ICPADS 2006), pp. 345-354, Minneapolis, MN, USA, 12-15 July, 2006
• E. Koukis and N. Koziris, “Memory Bandwidth Aware Scheduling for SMP Cluster Nodes,” Proceedings of the 13th Euromicro Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Network-based Processing (PDP '05), pp. 187-196, Lugano, Switzerland, 6-11 Feb. 2005