------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ******************************************************************************* ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- B O S T O N U N I V E R S I T Y Computer Science Department C O L L O Q U I U M Wednesday March 27, 1996 3:00 pm (Coffee served at 2:30 pm) Seminar Room / MCS 135 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ******************************************************************************* ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Network Protocol Performance in Shared-Memory Multiprocessor Servers Erich M. Nahum Department of Computer Science University of Massachusetts The information available via the global information infrastructure is growing rapidly as text-only information sources are augmented with voice, video and still image data. These factors dramatically increase the performance requirements for large scale information servers. Examples include digital libraries, video-on-demand, World-Wide Web servers and high-performance file systems. Parallelism can address this need for high performance. The goal of my research is to exploit parallelism in network protocol processing on shared-memory multiprocessor servers. My thesis identifies relevant performance issues in protocols on multiprocessors and presents solutions. I provide an implementation of parallelized TCP/IP and UDP/IP stacks using the x-Kernel and give results running on a 12 processor Silicon Graphics shared-memory multiprocessor. In this talk, I focus on two issues concerning network support for shared-memory multiprocessor servers. First, I examine parallelism using packets, demonstrating the available parallelism and the impact of issues such as packet ordering and protocol complexity. Second, I study network protocol memory reference behavior, via a validated execution-driven simulator. I show that instruction cache behavior is central to network protocol performance, and that TCP is more memory-bound than UDP. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- For colloquium info, including directions, see http://cs-www.bu.edu/colloquium For more information contact Prof. Mark Crovella -------------------------------------------------------------------------------