Questions
1. Where’s the bottleneck?
Answer: Host CPU overheads!
2. Are host overheads still important even with faster CPUs?
3. What optimizations are important for reducing overheads?
- larger MTUs (e.g., Alteon’s Jumbo Frames)?
- checksum offloading?
- zero-copy sockets ?
- or switch to user-level networking (e.g., VIA)?
4. How fast can we make TCP go?
Answer: More than a gigabit-per-second!
1147 Mb/s over Trapeze/Myrinet (LANai-7) on Alpha Monet