The Effectiveness of the Programmed Backoff Method in the Presence of Background Traffic

In many parallel processing applications, several nodes will complete a task at approximately the same time. If the application is run on an Ethernet, the near-simultaneity of the task completion times implies that when the tasks attempt to communicate with some central task manager, they will bump into each other. This in turn can cause a major slowdown in communication, as the Ethernet hardware generates unnecessarily long backoff times. A solution to this problem, called programmed backoff, has been proposed earlier and shown to work well on Ethernets which are dedicated to the particular application. In the present work, the effectiveness of programmed backoff is investigated in settings in which many unrelated applications are sharing the Ethernet