User-Space Communication: A Quantitative Study

Abstract

Powerful commodity systems and networks o#er a promising direction for high performance computing because they are inexpensive and they closely track technology progress. However, high, raw--hardware performance is rarely delivered to the end user. Previous work has shown that the bottleneck in these architectures is the overheads imposed by the software communication layer. To reduce these overheads, researchers have proposed a number of user-space communication models. The common feature of these models is that applications have direct access to the network, bypassing the operating system in the common case and thus avoiding the cost of send/receive system calls. In this paper we examine five user--space communication layers, that represent di#erent points in the configuration space: Generic AM, BIP-0.92, FM-2.02, PM-1.2, and VMMC-2. Although these systems support di#erent communication paradigms and employ a variety of di#erent implementation tradeo#s, we are able to quantitatively...