Design of an efficient Software Environment for a RDMA Network Interface Controller

The goal of this thesis is to evaluate the requirements, the design and the implementation of an efficient software interface for the Extoll NIC. The resulting software is called Extoll Software Stack (ESS). The design of the ESS should be efficient and exploit the maximum performance that will be offered by the Extoll NIC. The software interface should be clear and intuitive. An important point is the optimization of the software interface for an easy and efficient collaboration with already existing middle-wares, like MPI and DAPL. The first part of the thesis gives an overview of the currently available communication interfaces. The next part evaluates the Extoll NIC hostport interface. Based on the determined hostport interface the ESS design will be presented. The last part of the thesis gives an overview of the current implementation and testing environment of the ESS.