Summary and Conclusion
1. Hosts can keep up with Gigabit networks after all.
- But even fast hosts need to be clever.
2. Checksum offloading, zero-copy sockets, and larger MTUs are all valuable optimizations.
- Most effective in combination.
3. These optimizations are not specific to Trapeze/Myrinet.
- Alteon Tigon-II based NICs see an increase from 800Mb/s to 988Mb/sec performance with zero-copy sockets on Monets.
4. No need to move away from sockets & TCP/IP just yet.