Research On High Performance Socket Under Clusters Environment

Clusters have become the mainstream architecture of modern high performance computing platforms because of the high cost effectiveness and scalability. With the flourishing progress of Linux, cluster application domain has expanded from the traditional science and engineering computing to e-business and network services. However, most of the network applications are based on traditional Ethernet model, and can't be migrated into clusters directly. To have the existing applications migrate into clusters without modification or even recompilation of the source code is the primary goal and content of high performance socket (HPS) research.Compatibility and performance are the two requirements in HPS research. For the technical restriction before, it was soon found that it was very hard to accomplish the both factors gracefully. The price to realize the binary compatibility was very high so that the requirement of compatibility had to be decreased.As modern software products become more and more enormous and complex, the cost of migration and maintenance increase dramatically. Enhancing the compatibility becomes an urgent issue to be resolved, which is the motivation of this paper.To solve the problem, we analyzed the overhead during the typical process of communication based on TCP/IP stack. The experiment is performed on different platforms, which have different configuration and capability. It is shown in the experiment that the factors affecting the communication performance would vary with different platforms. The major works of this paper are listed as following:1) Analyzed the difference between clusters'communication and Internet communication, which is the start point of our research in HPS.2) Calculated the relationship among the platforms and the factors in HPS research and demonstrated the possibility to overcome compatibility problems during new technical conditions.3) Extracted four key questions in HPS research and designed a new method in HPS research, in which the TCP/IP stack is substituted by more efficient protocol stack named KVIA in the operating system kernel.4) Designed and implemented a HPS system sockvia which proved our work in HPS research.