Adapting the Network Interface for High-Performance Computing: The CNI Approach

As the prices of commodity workstations go down, clusters of workstations have started to emerge as a viable economic solution for scalable computing. Recent advances in networking technology have made it possible to obtain high-bandwidth connections between applications. However, the interconnect latency between workstation nodes in a cluster remains a serious concern and can prove to be the limiting factor in workstation performance. In this paper, we present the CNI orcluster network interface that achieves the twin goals of low latency and high bandwidth. In addition, CNI efficiently supports multiple programming paradigms for programming generality. This is done by functionally coupling the network interface more closely to the CPU without violating the constraints of a standard workstation architecture, CNI results in performance gains for applications, substantially reducing communication overhead and delay.