Reducing Data and Control Transfer Overhead through Network-Interface Support

This paper describes generic NI-level mechanisms that reduce data and control transfer overheads in user-level communicationsystems. These mechanisms reduce polling overhead without reducing throughput, improve multicast performance, and reduce the frequency of network and timer interrupts. They have all been implemented in a fam- ily of low-level Myrinet communication systems. We illus- trate the performanceimpact of these mechanismsusing mi- crobenchmarks and parallel-application measurements.