1. April 21, 2008 FSI Next Gen Stack Requirements Moiz Kohari – VP Engineering Patrick Mullaney – Architect

2. © Novell Inc, Confidential & Proprietary 2 What FSI wants Zero latency stack Deterministic latency in the presence of max load Scaling of throughput as the number of cores increases Sockets-like API Memory based API, direct access Identity integration at the device level Enterprise Support

3. © Novell Inc, Confidential & Proprietary 3 Bandwidth Issues and possible solution Memory Bandwidth Issue I/O bandwidth is increasing at a faster rate than memory bandwidth (PCI Express “Lane” vs I/O device slots)‏ The I/O Bottleneck Each application manages its own connected sockets An I/O operation (send or recv) results in a context switch and a memcpy Possible Solution Create an I/O processing Engine that manages “connected” sockets on applications' behalf

4. © Novell Inc, Confidential & Proprietary 4 Memory Based Messaging Scheme Certain applications may want to leverage memory based messaging Requires access to atomic operations over the fabric, for high performance synchronization schemes (provided under OFA)‏ Access to RDMA over the fabric (provided under OFA)‏ Standard API's for distributed application development

5. © Novell Inc, Confidential & Proprietary 5 What we currently see Native Stack latency – due to scheduling (-rt addresses this)‏ – latency due to lock contention (huge)‏ – context switches (app->softirq->driver)‏ – excess queuing (qdisc)‏ – latency due to protocol overhead – latency due to feature bloat OFED – verbs API provides excellent latency – ULPs introduce latency and COS contention

6. © Novell Inc, Confidential & Proprietary 6 What we currently see Native Linux Stack Scaling of udp throughput dependent benchmarks have shown marginal scalability as the number of processors increases

7. © Novell Inc, Confidential & Proprietary 7 Wombat Results Wombat MAMA Wombat Data Fabric SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time Wombat Mamaconsumer Subscriber Wombat Mamaproducer Publisher Wombat MAMA Wombat Data Fabric SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time Wombat Mamarelay Relay Computer 1Computer 2 InfiniBand Fabric

8. © Novell Inc, Confidential & Proprietary 8 SUSE ® Linux Enterprise Real Time, Wombat Data Fabric And Voltaire's Multicast Engine Delivering a mission-critical low-latency solution – 1 million messages per second – 43 microsecond average latency – 260 microsecond maximum latency – 7 microsecond standard deviation

9. © Novell Inc. All rights reserved 9 Low Latency Fluid Enterprise The Low Latency Fluid Enterprise uses low latency fabrics as system bus to connect all its components from Systems Management to Identity and from Virtual Machine to Storage and Networking. All components must be designed to minimize overall system latency. This will result in a fluid Enterprise that can rapidly adapt to changing application demand, computing power, networking bandwidth and storage capacity. Low Latency Fabrics Storage -HA Storage Infrastructure -SNIA based management Networking -Configurable QoS -Shielded Lanes for RT processes Security and Compliance -Intrusion prevention -VM isolation -Auditing Identity -Users -Services -Virt. Machines -Physical HW -Storage Systems Management -Orchestration -Monitoring -Configuration -Update -Tools -Based on Open Standards (CIM)‏ -Support HA Middleware -AMQP -Java -.NET/ Mono Applications -Infrastructure aware and exploiting -Non-exploiting RT Operating System (Guest)‏ RT Aware Virtualization RT Operating System (phys.)‏ Hardware

10. © Novell Inc, Confidential & Proprietary 10 What should be the goals Native Stack – reduce locking contention (keeping cores busy with real work)‏ > finer grain locks (flow based, cpu based)‏ > higher concurrency (true rwlocks, RCUs, lockless net-channels)‏ – reduce queuing – reduce context switches > adaptive locking > stack context consolidation (hard-isr, thread-isr, soft-isr, application)‏ OFED – ULPs fully support QOS – User level IP stack utilizing native stack bypass

11. © Novell Inc, Confidential & Proprietary 11 What should be the goals Zero Copy – Transmit side > vmsplice > rdma > “net channels” (Van Jacobson)‏ – Receive side > traditional mmu based » converse to vmsplice for rx » zero-copy net-channels > rdma

12. © Novell Inc, Confidential & Proprietary 12 What should be the goals End to end prioritization (it doesn't stop at the network interface)‏ – scheduler priority – packet priority – reserved/prioritized hardware queues and fabric For instance: – A mesh of finely clocked processes should be able to gain end to end priority access to the cpu/fabric preemptively over BE processing/flows within a local L2 segment.

13. © Novell Inc, Confidential & Proprietary 13 next gen hw support flexible fine grain classification – interrupts – memory management – queues event/flow agility – direct classified flows as discrete events to individual CPUs without impact on rest of the system – allow frequent low-cost re-routing as task affinity moves > MSI-X interrupt re-route

14. © Novell Inc, Confidential & Proprietary 14 Join the Lizard Blizzard!... Questions?

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