The Common Communication Interface (CCI)

Abstract

There are many APIs for connecting and exchanging data between network peers. Each interface varies wildly based on metrics including performance, portability, and complexity. Specifically, many interfaces make design or implementation choices emphasizing some of the more desirable metrics (e.g., performance) while sacrificing others (e.g., portability). As a direct result, software developers building large, network-based applications are forced to choose a specific network API based on a complex, multi-dimensional set of criteria. Such trade-offs inevitably result in an interface that fails to deliver some desirable features.In this paper, we introduce a novel interface that both supports many features that have become standard (or otherwise generally expected) in other communication interfaces, and strives to export a small, yet powerful, interface. This new interface draws upon years of experience from network-oriented software development best practices to systems-level implementations. The goal is to create a relatively simple, high-level communication interface with low barriers to adoption while still providing important features such as scalability, resiliency, and performance. The result is the Common Communications Interface (CCI): an intuitive API that is portable, efficient, scalable, and robust to meet the needs of network-intensive applications common in HPC and cloud computing.

Xen2MX: High-performance communication in virtualized environments

“…We also plan to follow closely the trends of Ethernet-based message passing protocols such as the Common Communication Interface (CCI [2]) and render our framework compatible with such protocols.…”

Xen2MX: Towards High-Performance Communication in the Cloud

“…Our future agenda consists of exploiting Xen2MX's binary compatibility with MX (and thus MPI), to deploy HPC applications over this framework and benefit from the flexibility of the split driver design and the scalability of using more than one driver domains. We also plan to closely follow the trends of Ethernet-based message passing protocols such as the Common Communication Interface (CCI [9]) and provide an easy way to adapt our framework to these protocols.…”

“…This has been widely considered as a bad move [9], especially due to the lack of scalability this implies. As the number of nodes/hosts climb the scale of 1000, then buffers associated with each node are non-negligible in terms of space requirements and management -let alone the mapping of every single host of the network.…”

Light-weight remote communication for high-performance cloud networks

“…The Common Communication Interface [19] is similar to our approach in that it provides a simple and hardwareindependent interface to high-performance hardware. It offers message-based, zero-copy communication and leverages hardware features to achieve high performance.…”