SCI for Local Area Networks

We show how the traditional protocol stack, such as TCP/IP, can be eliminated for socket based high speed communication within a cluster. The SCI shared memory interconnect is used as an example, and we demonstrate how existing applications can utilize the new technology without relinking. This is done by dynamically remapping the TCP/IP socket implementation to our high performance SCILAN sockets. We describe a novel mechanism for synchronization of communication through shared memory, aimed at minimizing the interrupt load on the receiving system. We discuss the implementation and present an evaluation with comparison to alternative technologies, such as 100baseT and ATM. Significant improvement over current solutions are shown both in terms of throughput and latency.