HVIA-GE: A Hardware Implementation of Virtual Interface Architecture Based on Gigabit Ethernet

Abstract

This paper presents the implementation and performance of the HVIA-GE card, which is a hardware implementation of the Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA) based on Gigabit Ethernet. VIA is a user-level communication interface for high performance PC clustering. The HVIA-GE card is a 32-bit/33MHz PCI adapter containing an FPGA for the VIA Protocol Engine (VPE) and a Gigabit Ethernet chip set to construct a high performance physical network. HVIA-GE performs virtual-to-physical address translation, doorbell, and send/receive completion operations in hardware without kernel intervention. In particular, the Address Translation Table (ATT) is stored on the local memory of the HVIA-GE card, and the VPE efficiently controls the address translation process by directly accessing the ATT. As a result, the communication overhead during send/receive transactions is greatly reduced. Our experimental results show a minimum latency of 12.2 μs, and a maximum bandwidth of 96.3 MB/s. In terms of minimum latency, HVIA-GE performs 4.7 times and 9.7 times faster than M-VIA, a software implementation of VIA, and TCP/IP, respectively, over Gigabit Ethernet. In addition, the maximum bandwidth of HVIA-GE is 52% and 60% higher than M-VIA and TCP/IP, respectively.