Abstract:

NIC is the network interface chip of the high performance interconnection network THNet. Based on proprietary protocol, it supports nonconnection oriented, zerocopy, Userlevel communication RDMA mechanism which provides high system scalability on MPI implementation. The proposed handle method of descriptor queue which can be triggered by incoming control packet supports offload collective communication such as broadcast and barrier. In tests, the network interface using the NIC chip obtained the lowest oneway latency 1.57μs and 6.34GB/s peak bandwidth. NIC has been applied in Tianhe1A supercomputer which was ranked NO.1 in World’s TOP500 Supercomputers 2010.

Key words: interconnection networks;network interface;user level communication;RDMA;collective communication;Tianhe1A