A Transport-Friendly NIC for Multicore/Multiprocessor Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces A-TFN, a NIC with a data steering mechanism that improves cache efficiency and TCP/IP performance in multicore/multiprocessor systems by ensuring data is processed on the same core as its application.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel NIC design with a data steering mechanism that enhances TCP/IP performance by maintaining core affinity for network data processing.

Findings

A-TFN accelerates TCP/IP performance in multicore systems.

The data steering mechanism improves cache utilization.

Experimental results confirm performance gains.

Abstract

Receive side scaling (RSS) is a network interface card (NIC) technology. It provides the benefits of parallel receive processing in multiprocessing environments. However, existing RSS-enabled NICs lack a critical data steering mechanism that would automatically steer incoming network data to the same core on which its application process resides. This absence causes inefficient cache usage if an application is not running on the core on which RSS has scheduled the received traffic to be processed. In Linux systems, it cannot even ensure that packets in a TCP flow are processed by a single core, even if the interrupts for the flow are pinned to a specific core. This results in degraded performance. In this paper, we develop such a data steering mechanism in the NIC for multicore or multiprocessor systems. This data steering mechanism is mainly targeted at TCP, but it can be extended to other transport layer protocols. We term a NIC with such a data steering mechanism "A Transport Friendly NIC" (A-TFN). Experimental results have proven the effectiveness of A-TFN in accelerating TCP/IP performance.