HPCwire: 10GbE Networking for HPC -- Applications and Technology Trends

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June 15, 2009

10GbE Networking for HPC -- Applications and Technology Trends

by Saqib Jang, Margalla Communications

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The first in a two-part series, this article examines the drivers for 10GbE deployment for high-performance cluster computing (HPCC) environments and related technology trends.

Ten Gigabit-per-second Ethernet (10GbE) represents the next level of Ethernet network bandwidth, with networking vendors promoting it as the next great capability. But high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure and operations professionals must strike a balance between constant operational improvement and sound financial decision-making. So far, 10GbE has been a high-end luxury for environments that want maximum performance regardless of cost, but that's changing fast. The per-port pricing gap between 10GbE and alternate network options is narrowing rapidly as more vendors increase the competitive pressure on pricing for related components.

So where will this technology truly matter for HPC environments? This article examines the impact of 10GbE on HPC infrastructure and provides guidance for the most effective transformation of your network. The initial focus will be on the top drivers and applications for 10GbE deployment in HPC environments and then the leading technology trends impacting 10GbE NIC designs will be reviewed. The next article in the series will examine the major offerings in the 10GbE NIC area.

Network Convergence for HPC Datacenters

Clusters of commodity servers have rapidly evolved into a highly cost-effective form of supercomputer. As the technology has matured and costs have declined, enterprises across a wide range of industries have begun leveraging HPC for product design and simulation, data analysis and other highly compute intensive applications that were previously beyond the reach of IT budgets. Off-the-shelf clusters frequently use Gigabit Ethernet as the cluster interconnect technology, but a number of cluster vendors are exploiting more specialized cluster interconnect fabrics that feature very low message-passing latency.

Although Ethernet has been the de facto technology for the general purpose LAN, Gigabit Ethernet has been considered as a sub-optimal switching fabric for very high performance cluster interconnect and storage networking. This is due primarily to performance issues stemming from the fact that GbE has lower bandwidth than InfiniBand and Fibre Channel, and typically exhibits significantly higher end-to-end latency and CPU utilization.

However, this situation has changed dramatically due to recent developments in low-latency 10 GbE switching and intelligent Ethernet NICs that offload cluster and storage protocol processing from the host processor. These enhancements allow server end systems to fully exploit 10 GbE line rates, while reducing one-hop end-to-end latency to less than 10 microseconds and CPU utilization for line-rate transfers to less than 10 percent.

As a result, 10 GbE end-to-end performance now compares very favorably with that of more specialized datacenter interconnects, eliminating performance as a drawback to the adoption of an Ethernet unified datacenter fabric. Off-loading cluster and storage protocol processing from the central CPU to intelligent 10GbE NIC can also improve the power efficiency of end stations because off-load ASIC processors are generally considerably more power efficient in executing protocol workloads.

10GbE R-NICs for Low-Latency IPC

Traditionally, TCP/IP protocol processing has been performed in software by the end system's CPU. The load on the CPU increases linearly as a function of packets processed, with the usual rule of thumb being that each bit per second of bandwidth consumes about a Hz of CPU clock (e.g., 1 Gbps of network traffic consumes about 1 GHz of CPU). As more of the host CPU is consumed by the network load, both CPU utilization and host send/receive latency become significant issues.

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