A Study between Networks and General Purpose Systems for High Bandwidth Applications

The goal of this study is to investigate system bottlenecks for high bandwidth applications and how they shift from one component to another over time. The model we built emphasizes the flow of bytes in each protocol; the model imitates how typical device drivers move bytes from the network card to memory, and how typical protocol implementations move bytes around memory. Network speeds have been increasing at a very fast rate over the last decade. 100Mb/s sec network interfaces are virtually ubiquitous, 1 Gb/s interfaces are becoming standard and inexpensive, and 10 Gb/s interfaces are already commercially available. As higher speed network data transfers have become possible high bandwidth applications are likely to become a driving factor in computer system design. Network interfaces are not the only piece of hardware involved in high bandwidth applications; processors, disks, and memory architecture all play equally important roles. It is important to consider if these components can keep up with the increasing network speeds. In order to gain insight in the performance of computer systems as individual components increase in performance at different rates, we evaluated some existing systems and built a simulator, called sysSIM that models the flow of bytes through the components of a system. SysSIM is a discrete event driven simulator that allows us to investigate the roles and interactions of all of these components (CPU, memory, and network interfaces) to identify bottle necks. We conclude our study with a 40 year view of how the bottleneck has shifted from the network (prior to 1995) to the processor (between 1995 and 2007), and to the memory (beyond 2007). John Bresnahan, Ioan Raicu, Gohar Margaryan CMSC322: Computer Architecture – Spring Quarter 2004 Department of Computer Science University of Chicago [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]