Title
Design Trade-Offs for User-Level I/O Architectures
Abstract
To address the growing I/O bottleneck, next-generation distributed I/O architectures employ scalable point-to-point interconnects and minimize operating system overhead by providing user-level access to the I/O subsystem. Reduced I/O overhead allows I/O intensive applications to efficiently employ latency hiding techniques for improved throughput. This paper presents the design of a novel scalable user-level I/O architecture and evaluates the impact of various architectural mechanisms in terms of overall performance improvement. Results demonstrate that eliminating data movement across protection domains is the dominant contributor to improved scalability. Eliminating system call and interrupt overhead only has a small additional benefit that may not justify the additional hardware support required. While this evaluation is based on one specific design, the conclusions can be generalized to other user-level I/O architectures.
Year
DOI
Venue
2006
10.1109/TC.2006.122
IEEE Trans. Computers
Keywords
Field
DocType
o overhead,user-level access,o bottleneck,o architecture,o subsystem,o intensive application,interrupt overhead,additional hardware support,system overhead,design trade-offs,o architectures,novel scalable user-level,input output devices,simulation,indexing terms,input output,point to point,architecture
Interrupt,Bottleneck,Computer science,Parallel computing,Input/output,Real-time computing,System call,Throughput,Memory architecture,Scalability,Performance improvement,Embedded system
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
55
8
0018-9340
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
6
0.59
10
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Lambert Schaelicke127920.23
Alan L. Davis24511.74