This paper describes a mechanism for reducing the cost of waiting f o r messages in architectures that allow user-level communication libraries. We reduce waiting costs in two ways: b y reducing the cost of servicing interrupts, and by carefully controlling when the system uses interrupts and when at uses polling. We have implemented our mechanism on the SHRIMP multicomputer and integrated it with our user-level sockets library. Experiments show that a hybrid spin-thenblock strategy oflers good performance an a wade variety of situations, and that speeding up the interrupt path significantly improves performance.
An important aspect of a high-speed network system is the ability to transfer data directly between the network interface and application buffers. Such a
direct data path
requires the network interface to "know" the virtual-to-physical address translation of a user buffer,
i.e
., the physical memory location of the buffer. This paper presents an efficient address translation architecture, User-managed TLB (UTLB), which eliminates system calls and device interrupts from the common communication path. UTLB also supports application-specific policies to pin and unpin application memory. We report micro-benchmark results for an implementation on Myrinet PC clusters. A trace-driven analysis is used to compare the UTLB approach with the interrupt-based approach. It is also used to study the effects of UTLB cache size, associativity, and prefetching. Our results show that the UTLB approach delivers robust performance with relatively small translation cache sizes.
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