DARPA Creates New Networking Approaches to Increase Distributed Application Performance in 100 times

Dr. Jonathan Smith, program manager at the DARPA Information Innovation Office, believes that the true bottleneck for processor bandwidth is the network interface used to connect the machine to an external network, such as Ethernet, which severely limits processor load capacity. Today, the throughput of a network built using modern technology is about 10 ^ 14 bits / s, and data is processed together with a speed of about 10 ^ 14 bits / s. The current stacks provide the application throughput only from 10 ^ 10 to 10 ^ 11 bits / s.

To speed distributed applications and narrow the performance gap, DARPA has launched Fast Network Interface Cards (FastNIC).

Creating a network stack is costly and complex - from maximizing the connections between hardware and software to processing application interfaces. Strong commercial incentives aimed at cautiously gradual advancement of new technologies in many independent market segments discouraged anyone from using the stack as a whole.

To help substantiate the need for such a significant revision, FastNICs will select a demonstration application and provide it with the necessary hardware support, an operating system, and application interfaces that provide overall system acceleration thanks to faster network adapters.

Part of the FastNIC program will focus on developing hardware systems to significantly improve the speed of the aggregated raw server data channel. In this area, researchers will design, implement, and demonstrate 10Tbps network interface hardware using existing or planned hardware interfaces. Hardware solutions must connect to servers through one or more standard interface points, such as I / O buses, multiprocessor interconnect networks, and memory slots, in order to support fast migration to FastNIC technology.

A second area of ​​research will focus on developing the system software needed to manage FastNIC hardware resources. To achieve a 100-fold increase in throughput at the application level, system software must ensure efficient and parallel data transfer between network equipment and other system components.