DMD: network device driver architecture for high-performance systems

Communication pattern in cluster internetworking consists of high frequency of small messages. Overhead for this type of communication exhibited by network subsystems of standard operating systems is a bottleneck, thus preventing application from full utilization of high-performance communication technologies. This paper describes the behavior of standard network subsystems and describes novelty network device driver architecture, fully transparent to the rest of the system that addresses extreme performance requirements by using off-the-shelf components (Gigabit Ethernet). The result of this prototype shows significant performance gain compared with standard network subsystems.