Design of NIC Based on I/O Processor for Cluster Interconnect Network

An effective interconnect network interface card (NIC) is critical to the achievement of a high-performance cluster system. An original NIC architecture based on the Intel IOP310 I/O processor chipset is presented in this paper. The NIC is a part of DCNet, which is the cluster interconnect network developed by NCIC. The I/O processor makes it powerful for the NIC to offload the processing of communication protocol from the host CPU. In the NIC architecture, the memory bus is extended to be a local bus for system peripheral interconnection, and a memory integrated network interface (MINI) is implemented and embedded. The testing results of DCNet show that the NIC obtains reasonable user-level communication performance, and prove that the NIC architecture, which based on I/O processor and the MINI approach, is feasible and effective to achieve the high performance.