2006 MCS Divisional Seminars & Colloquia

Designing High-Performance Communication Support for Sockets-based Applications over System-area and Wide-area Networks

   Pavan Balaji

 Ohio State University

  Hosted by  Rajeev Thakur

10:30 AM, March 24, 2006
Building 221,  Room A216

In the past decade more than a dozen high-speed networks have been introduced, each superseding the others with respect to raw performance, communication features and capabilities. However, such aggressive initiative in the high-speed network market is accompanied by an increasing divergence in the communication interface or "language" used by each network. Accordingly, portability for applications across these various networks has recently been a topic of extensive research. Programming models such as the Sockets Interface, Message Passing Interface (MPI), Shared memory models, etc., have been widely accepted as the primary means for achieving such portability.

In this presentation, I will talk about the different design choices for implementing one such programming model, namely, Sockets, in various System-area Network (SAN) as well as Wide-area Network (WAN) environments. Specifically, the talk will target three important subproblems: (a) designing efficient Sockets implementations to allow existing applications to be directly and transparently deployed on to clusters connected with high-speed networks (both SANs such as InfiniBand as well as WANs such as iWARP or TCP offload based 10-Gigabit Ethernet), (b) analyzing the limitations of the sockets interface in various domains and understanding the features that applications need, but are missing in the sockets interface, and (c) designing an extended sockets programming model by integrating application requirements with the network capabilities while minimizin the modifications needed. The proposed extended sockets programming model combined with the efficient implementation of existing sockets functionalities allows development of applications and other upper layers in an efficient and seamless manner with respect both SANs as well as WANs.