VIBe: a micro-benchmark suite for evaluating virtual interface architecture (VIA) implementations

The Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA) has been recently proposed to standardize different existing user-level networking protocols for System Area Networks (SANs). Since the introduction of VIA, software and hardware implementations of VIA have become available. VIA has different components (such as doorbells completion queues, and virtual-to-physical address translation) and attributes (such as maximum transfer unit and reliability modes). Different implementations of VIA lead to different design strategies for efficiently implementing higher level communication layers/libraries (such as Message Passing Interface (MPI)). It also has implication on the performance of applications: Currently, there is no framework for evaluating different design choices and for obtaining insight about the design choices made in a particular implementation of VIA and their impact on the performance. In this paper, we address these issues by proposing a new microbenchmark suite called Virtual Interface Architecture Benchmark (VIBe) This suite consists of several microbenchmarks which are divided into three major categories: non-data transfer related micro-benchmarks, data transfer related micro-benchmarks, and programming model related micro-benchmarks. By using the new benchmark suite, the performance of VIA implementations can be evaluated under different communication scenarios and with respect to the implementation of different components and attributes of VIA. We demonstrate the use of VIBe to evaluate three implementations of VIA (M-VIA on Gigabit Ethernet, Berkeley VIA on Myrinet and cLAN VIA on Giganet). We show how the VIBe suite can provide insights to the implementation details of VIA and help software developers of programming model layers on top of VIA