Accelerating netty-based applications through transparent InfiniBand support

TL;DR

This paper introduces hadroNIO, a Java library extension that enables netty-based applications to transparently utilize InfiniBand, significantly improving network performance and bandwidth utilization without source code modifications.

Contribution

The paper presents hadroNIO extensions for netty, supporting InfiniBand via UCX, achieving low latency and high bandwidth in Java applications.

Findings

Round-trip times as low as 5 microseconds

Full utilization of 100 Gbit/s bandwidth

Outperforms traditional sockets and libvma in tests

Abstract

Many big-data frameworks are written in Java, e.g. Apache Spark, Flink and Cassandra. These systems use the networking framework netty which is based on Java NIO. While this allows for fast networking on traditional Ethernet networks, it cannot fully exploit the whole performance of modern interconnects, like InfiniBand, providing bandwidths of 100 Gbit/s and more. In this paper we propose netty support for hadroNIO, a Java library, providing transparent InfiniBand support for Java applications based on NIO. hadroNIO is based on UCX, which supports several interconnects, including InfiniBand. We present hadroNIO extensions and optimizations for supporting netty. The evaluations with microbenchmarks, covering single- and multi-threaded scenarios, show that it is possible for netty applications to reach round-trip times as low as 5 us and fully utilize the 100 Gbit/s bandwidth of high-speed NICs, without changing the application's source code. We also compare hadroNIO with traditional sockets, as well as libvma and the results show, that hadroNIO offers a substantial improvement over plain sockets and can outperform libvma in several scenarios.