Collaborative visualization tools for the analysis of petascale combustion simulation data

poste

Sockets Direct Procotol over InfiniBand in Clusters: Is it Beneficial?

The Sockets Direct Protocol (SDP) has been proposed recently in order to enable sockets based applications to take advantage of the enhanced features provided by InfiniBand Architecture. In this paper, we study the benefits and limitations of an implementation of SDP. We first analyze the performance of SDP based on a detailed suite of micro-benchmarks. Next, we evaluate it on two real application domains: (1) A multi-tier Data-Center environment and (2) A Parallel Virtual File System (PVFS). Our microbenchmark results show that SDP is able to provide up to 2.7 times better bandwidth as compared to the native sockets implementation over InfiniBand (IPoIB) and significantly better latency for large message sizes. Our experimental results also show that SDP is able to achieve a considerably higher performance (improvement of up to 2.4 times) as compared to IPoIB in the PVFS environment. In the data-center environment, SDP outperforms IPoIB for large file transfers in-spite of currently being limited by a high connection setup time. However, this limitation is entirely implementation specific and as the InfiniBand software and hardware products are rapidly maturing, we expect this limitation to be overcome soon. Based on this, we have shown that the projected performance for SDP, without the connection setup time, can outperform IPoIB for small message transfers as well

Supporting Strong Coherency for Active Caches in Multi-Tier Data-Centers over InfiniBand

... that in order to provide or design a data-center environment which is efficient and offers high performance, one of the critical issues that needs to be addressed is the effective reuse of cache content stored away from the origin server. In the current web, many cache eviction policies and uncachable resources are driven by two server application goals: Cache Coherence and Cache Consistency. The problem of how to provide consistent caching for dynamic content (Active Caches) has been well studied and researchers have proposed several weak as well as strong consistency algorithms. However, the problem of maintaining cache coherence has not been studied as much. In this paper, we propose an architecture for achieving strong cache coherence for multi-tier data-centers over InfiniBand using the previously proposed client-polling mechanism. The architecture as such could be used with any protocol layer; we have also proposed some optimizations to the algorithm to take advantage of the advanced features provided by InfiniBand. We evaluate this architecture using three protocol platforms: (i) TCP/IP over InfiniBand (IPoIB), (ii) Sockets Direct Protocol over InfiniBand (SDP) and (iii) the native InfiniBand Verbs layer (VAPI) and compare it with the performance of the no-caching based coherence mechanism. Our experimental results show that the InfiniBand-Optimized architecture can achieve an improvement of nearly an order of magnitude compared to the throughput achieved by the TCP/IP based architecture (over IPoIB), the SDP based architecture and the no-cache based coherence scheme

Sockets Direct Protocol over InfiniBand in Clusters: Is it Beneficial?

InfiniBand has been recently standardized by the industry to design next generation high-end clusters for both datacenter and high performance computing domains. Though InfiniBand has been able support low latency and high bandwidth, traditional sockets based applications have not been able to take advantage of this; this is mainly attributed to the multiple copies and kernel context switches associated with the traditional TCP/IP protocol stack. The Sockets Direct Protocol (SDP) had been proposed recently in order to enable sockets based applications to take advantage of the enhanced features provided by InfiniBand Architecture. In thi

Supporting Strong Coherency for Active Caches in Multi-Tier Data-Centers over InfiniBand

It has been well acknowledged in the research community that in order to provide or design a data-center environment which is efficient and offers high performance, one of the critical issues that needs to be addressed is the effective reuse of cache content stored away from the origin server. In the current web, many cache eviction policies and uncachable resources are driven by two server application goals: Cache Coherence and Cache Consistency. The problem of how to provide consistent caching for dynamic content (Active Caches) has been well studied and researchers have proposed several weak as well as strong consistency algorithms. However, the problem of maintaining cache coherence has not been studied as much. In this paper, we propose an architecture for achieving strong cache coherence for multi-tier data-centers over InfiniBand using the previously proposed client-polling mechanism. The architecture as such could be used with any protocol layer. We have also proposed some optimizations to the algorithm to take advantage of the advanced features provided by InfiniBand. We evaluate this architecture using three protocol platforms: (i) TCP/IP over InfiniBand (IPoIB), (ii) Sockets Direct Protocol over InfiniBand (SDP) and (iii) the native InfiniBand Verbs layer (VAPI) and compare it with the performance of the no-caching based coherence mechanism. Our experimental results show that the InfiniBand-Optimized architecture can achieve an improvement of nearly an order of magnitude compared to the throughput achieved by the TCP/IP based architecture (over IPoIB), the SDP based architecture and the no-cache based coherence scheme

Correction: Vaidyanathan et al. Are We Eating Our Way to Prostate Cancer—A Hypothesis Based on the Evolution, Bioaccumulation, and Interspecific Transfer of miR-150. Non-Coding RNA 2016, 2, 2.

The authors wish to make the following correction to this paper [1].[...