miNI

miNI
miNI
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Major idea:
move all lookup tabgles to the host memory and use NIC memory as a cache to save memory space required by NIC.
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Background
NIC must maintain

NIC need the ability to directly manipulate user-level

communication buffers for delivering data and achiving protection.

NIC must maintain appropriate translatin data structures to achieve

this ability.

Information to be maintained in NIC memory:
1)address translation info
2)registered communication bffers and authentication info
3)processes communicaton context

Other's solution: static
their solution: dynamic handle lookup
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Problem of old solution:
static
1)it requires modern NIC to support large amounts of on-board

memory at singificant cost. (2002 data: 2M $995, 4M $1,295, 8M

$1,595)

2)limit the amount of host memory that can be used for

communication buffers.(the reason given by the author is Not

convicing)

New solution
dynamic handle lookup
eliminates the limitations of usser-level communication system on

the
1) total size of the communication virtual address space
2) teh total number of communication buffers and connections
3) teh number of concurrent processes

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Benifits:
1.reduce the amount of NIC memory required in the system
by a factor of 2 for the total NIC memory
2.reduuce the memory for lookup structure by 80%
3. eliminates the limitations and complexites
4. execution time increase at 3% for all but one application they

examined.
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Related work:

UTLB, it dynamic approach is only applicaton to the send path of the NIC, not the receive path of the NIC.

U-NET/MM does not support RDMA operations.
I don't understand why "in miNI there is no need to notify the host system in the case of an eviction. (line 4, page 264)"

VIA: limits the total size of the registered buffer (Not convincing)

InfiniBand: almost follows VIA
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Further reading:
[1].Evaluating the performance imact of dynamic handle lookup in modern network interfaces(SAN-2 workshop 2003)
[10]UTLB(ASPLOS8, Oct,1998)
[21]Design challenges of virtual networks: Fast,general purpose communication(PPoPP 99)