An Integrated Approach for Quality of Service in Cluster Networks

Multiprocessor interconnects have been designed primarily to provide high

throughput and low latency for best-effort traffic. This is true for

processing node architectures and communication software as well. However,

with the increasing use of these systems (clusters in particular) for

interactive applications such as multimedia, web servers and electronic

commerce, predictable communication performance, called Quality of service

(QoS), has become a major concern. Many of these applications require

guaranteed communication delay and bandwidth, in addition to low latency

and high throughput. The main focus of this research is to design an

end-to-end communication infrastructure for a cluster system to support

different applications with varying QoS requirements. The research

activities include (1) router architecture design and evaluation to provide

predictable and high performance; (2) network interface and software

messaging layer support to inject/eject traffic into/from the network as

per QoS requirements; and (3) CPU scheduling mechanisms that propagate

these capabilities up to the application level. The research proposes to

seamlessly integrate these three components to provide a high performance

communication architecture with QoS guarantees.