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Abstract : |
Emerging high-speed networks provide several hundred megabits per second to several gigabits per second of raw communication bandwidth. However, the maximum achievable throughput available to the end-user or application is quite limited. In order to fully utilize the network bandwidth and to improve the performance at the application level, a careful examination of I/O subsystems is essential. In this paper, we study one emerging high-speed network, the Fibre Channel network. The objectives of this study are: 1) to understand how the I/O subsystem relates to network operations, 2) to evaluate and analyze the performance of such a subsystem, and 3) to propose possible approaches for improving the maximum achievable bandwidth and reducing end-to-end communication latency. We will show (by simply modifying device driver code) a 75 % maximum achievable bandwidth improvement and a 15.9 % latency reduction for short packets. Other ways of improving network performance are also discussed., |
