Performance of message-passing systems using a zero-copy communication protocol

Despite technological advantages in microprocessors and network technology over the last few years, commercially-available networks of workstations (NOWs) contain inherent communication bottlenecks Traditional layered network protocols will inevitably fail to achieve high throughput if they access data several times. As a result, applications an NOWs often fail to observe the performance speed-up that might be expected. Network protocols which avoid routing through the kernel can remove this limit an communication performance and support very high transmission speeds, turning NOWs into an attractive alternative to Massively-Parallel Processors. This paper investigates the improvements in performance of an entire NOW system that are possible by changing communication protocols. A commodity workstation cluster with a zero-copy communication protocol (Basic Interface Parallelism) is examined and compared with both conventional protocol implementations and parallel systems in order to understand and assess the improvements in performance achieved.