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News Archives
[Colloquium] Optimizing Overlay-Based Virtual Networking Through Optimistic Interrupts and Cut-Through Forwarding
December 7, 2012
Watch Colloquium:
M4V file (305 MB)
- Date: Friday, December 7, 2012
- Time: 12:00 pm — 12:50 pm
- Place: Centennial Engineering Center 1041
Zheng Cui
Department of Computer Science University of New Mexico
Overlay-based virtual networking provides a powerful model for realizing virtual distributed and parallel computing systems with strong isolation, portability, and recoverability properties. However, in extremely high throughput and low latency networks, such overlays can suffer from bandwidth and latency limitations, which is of particular concern if we want to apply the model in HPC environments. Through careful study of an existing very high performance overlay-based virtual network system, we have identified two core issues limiting performance: delayed and/or excessive virtual interrupt delivery into guests, and copies between host and guest data buffers done during encapsulation. We respond with two novel optimizations: optimistic, timer-free virtual interrupt injection, and zero-copy cut-through data forwarding. These optimizations improve the latency and bandwidth of the overlay network on 10 Gbps interconnects, resulting in near-native performance for a wide range of microbenchmarks and MPI application benchmarks.
Bio: Zheng Cui is a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico. Her research interests include virtualization, virtual networking, and HPC.
