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Downloading at warp speed
As network speeds have increased to 10 gigabits per second and beyond, today’s CPUs have been unable to sustain the increased network processing requirements while at the same time meeting computational needs. However, specialty network solutions, such as InfiniBand, have long been available to solve this problem. The downside is the incompatibility with the existing TCP/IP based networking infrastructure that is common today.
iWARP, though, bridges the gap between high performance networking and TCP/IP compatibility. The term iWARP refers to a set of published protocol specifications that provide remote read- and write-access to user applications, without operating system intervention or intermediate data copies. The result is higher throughput and lower latency transfers. While hardware implementations of iWARP have begun to emerge, a software implementation is useful to serve as a transition mechanism and for protocol testing and research.
Another benefit provided by iWARP is single-side acceleration. In other words, only one end of a connection needs to have iWARP hardware to see local advantages, if the other side is equipped with iWARP. This is particularly attractive for the very common single-server, many-client scenarios.
Experiments conducted by Ohio Supercomputer Center researchers show that, with single-side acceleration, the sender system load drops from 35 percent to 5 percent, and receiver load drops from 90 percent to less than 5 percent, for 1 gigabit-per-second communication.
