Enhancing Distributed Systems with Low-Latency Networking

Recently several network technologies which support user-level communication between processes using a shared-memory interface have become available [4, 7]. These technologies o#er very low latency, high bandwidth communication by eliminating the need for software protocol stacks. Whilst there has been much research on the use of such networks in the context of parallel computing [5, 6, 13], relatively little work has been done on their suitability for distributed applications. This paper describes the work undertaken to integrate the Scalable Coherent Interface (SCI) interconnect with the standard NFS server and a CORBA 2.0 compliant ORB over Linux. It is shown that impressive performance increases can be achieved without modification to either the operating system or the distributed application. Keywords: SCI, CORBA, NFS. 1 Introduction The computing environment at the Olivetti & Oracle Research Laboratory (ORL) is highly heterogenous, supporting our work in multimedia and sensor d..