Increasing Performance in Commodity IP

Clusters built from commodity hardware and software have several advantages over more traditional supercomputers. Commodity clusters are cheap and ubiquitous, and so they are easier to design, program and maintain. However, even as high-speed networks reach 10Gb/s speeds and modern computer architectures reach past 1Ghz, new commodity clusters are not able to harness this power. One of the bottlenecks to high-performance computing using commodity hardware and protocols is interrupt pressure. We examine several methods used to relieve interrupt pressure in practice and propose a new solution, offloading IP fragmentation and reassembly onto a network interface card (NIC). Our proposed solution provides the performance gains of lower communication overhead and high bandwidth without sacrificing the advantages of using commodity hardware and protocols.