Cluster:LowLatency

From Earlham CS Department
Revision as of 16:04, 20 October 2005 by Tmcnulty (talk | contribs) (Notes: add tp_timer slideshow)
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Plan (updated August 28, 2005)

  • Decide on two benchmarks, one micro (low-level) and one application, probably MD with GROMACS in a form that's latency bound on bazaar & Cairo. Set these up on bazaar and Cairo and start tests.
  • Formal literature search and preliminary review.
  • Test tcp_low_latency - does it work? If so, what does it do _exactly_
  • Show that latency is in the network stack, either by reference or by test (preferrably the former since it will take less time).

Packet Diagram

Packet Diagram

Running Timer Code

Running Timer Code

Notes

  • BibTeX references are in /cluster/project/llk/llk.bib
  • Comparisons & Instrumentation
  • Low Latency Kernel Option
    • net.ipv4.tcp_low_latency sysctl
      • /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_low_latency
    • From /usr/src/linux/Documentation/networking/ip-sysctl.txt
       tcp_low_latency - BOOLEAN
       If set, the TCP stack makes decisions that prefer lower
       latency as opposed to higher throughput.  By default, this
       option is not set meaning that higher throughput is preferred.
       An example of an application where this default should be
       changed would be a Beowulf compute cluster.
       Default: 0

Ideas

  • Reduce error checking to improve performance
  • Reduce number of memory copies, maybe by not being fully TCP/IP-compliant?
  • Look into STP (scheduled transfer protocol)
  • Check out the TCP_NODELAY sockopt:
 if(setsockopt(sockfd, proto->p_proto, TCP_NODELAY, &one, sizeof(one)) < 0)
 {
   printf("NetPIPE: setsockopt: TCP_NODELAY failed! errno=%d\n", errno);
   exit(556);
 }

http://www.openldap.org/lists/openldap-devel/199907/msg00079.html

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