Interactions between Myrinet Network Interfaces and Host Architectures

This paper presents a series of experiments for evaluating the influence of the interaction between Network Interfaces (NIs) and host computer systems on the performance of a messaging system based on Myrinet. Major points of interest are the data transfer between user buffers and NI local memory and the synchronization between host systems and NIs. The paper provides a taxonomy of various transfer modes and synchronization schemes, describes experiments for their performance evaluation, and analyzes the results on a specific platform as well as between different platforms. Furthermore, this paper points out the affects of the reviewed data transfer modes and synchronization schemes on the overall performance of Myrinet based message-passing systems and finally, proposes certain architectural solutions in future NICs for increasing the efficiency of their interaction with host computer systems. Keywords: network interface, data transfer modes, synchronization, interaction, messagepassi..