Abstract

Introduction In the past, multicomputer designers focused their efforts on the interconnect and node processor. The network interface, seen as significant to the operating system only, was deemed incidental to performance. More recently, designers have recognized the benefits of streamlining network access [7] and allowing application code direct access to the network interface [12, 10]. To evaluate tradeoffs in network interface designs, we use the Meerkat simulator and the 2 same suite of parallel applications described in Chapter 5. We augment the original Meerkat simulator with device models for three additional network interfaces. Each interface device model has corresponding run-time interface code that interprets the message-passing primitives. We run the applications on the simulator and measure the elapsed simulation time. From these measurements, we derive data bandwidth for some tests and speedups for others. Our four network interface models represent di

Citations