Virtual memory mapped network interface for the SHRIMP multicomputer

Abstract

The network interfaces of existing multicomputers require a significant amount of software overhead to provide protection and to implement message passing protocols. The authors describe the design of a low-latency, high-bandwidth, virtual memory-mapped network interface for the SHRIMP multicomputer project at Princeton University. Without sacrificing protection, the network interface achieves low latency by using virtual memory mapping and write-latency hiding techniques, and obtains high bandwidth by providing a user-level block data transfer mechanism. The authors have implemented several message passing primitives in an experimental environment, demonstrating that their approach can reduce the message passing overhead to a few user-level instructions.