Anatomy of UDP and M-VIA for cluster communication

High interprocess communication latency is detrimental to parallel and grid computing. Over the years, the network bandwidth has increased rapidly while the end-to-end latency has not decreased much. This is because the latency is dominated by the protocol software execution time in the kernel instead of the raw transmission time over the link. In this paper, we perform an anatomical analysis of the complete communication path between a sender and a receiver through measurements. We present an in-depth evaluation of various components of the UDP protocol over Fast Ethernet. Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA) protocol has been recently proposed to overcome the software overhead of the TCP/UDP/IP protocol. We analyze M-VIA, a modular VIA implementation for Linux over Ethernet, and compare its performance with UDP. The aim of our experiments is to present the protocol overheads in details rather than to suggest new techniques to reduce overheads.