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Performance Issues in Parallelized Network Protocols


Erich M. Nahum, David J. Yates, James F. Kurose, and Don Towsley
Department of Computer Science
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA 01003

Abstract

Parallel processing has been proposed as a means of improving network protocol throughput. Several different strategies have been taken towards parallelizing protocols. A relatively popular approach is packet-level parallelism, where packets are distributed across processors.

This paper provides an experimental performance study of packet-level parallelism on a contemporary shared-memory multiprocessor. We examine several unexplored areas in packet-level parallelism and investigate how various protocol structuring and implementation techniques can affect performance. We study TCP/IP and UDP/IP protocol stacks, implemented with a parallel version of the x-kernel running in user space on Silicon Graphics multiprocessors.

Our results show that only limited packet-level parallelism can be achieved within a single connection under TCP, but that using multiple connections can improve available parallelism. We also demonstrate that packet ordering plays a key role in determining single-connection TCP performance, that careful use of locks is a necessity, and that selective exploitation of caching can improve throughput. We also describe experiments that compare parallel protocol performance on two generations of a parallel machine and show how computer architectural trends can influence performance.


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