Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!uwvax!oddjob!ncar!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!CIS.UPENN.EDU!farber From: farber@CIS.UPENN.EDU (David Farber) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: Off loading the protocol Message-ID: <8803180638.1.UUL1.2#104@cis.upenn.edu> Date: 18 Mar 88 11:38:56 GMT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 64 The following is abstracted from a note on our experiences with a line of research aimed at eamining a radically different approach to "off loading" designed for the very high speed networking era -- "Gigabit networking". I would be happy to supply the full text and/or memnet documents to any interested people. Some Thoughts on the Impact of Very High Speed Networking on Processor Interfaces ...... Approach This note proposes a completely different view of computer networking, a view which derives from experiments started in my group at the University of Delaware (and continuing at the University of Pennsylvania) resulting in the creation a novel local network architecture called "MEMNet." MEMNet is a research system aimed at exploring ways of removing the severe processing overhead found in distributed operating systems. The approach MEMNet takes is to treat the network as a mechanism which allows a processor to access the collective memory space of the distributed system. Thus, when a processor in a MEMNet environment needs to send data via the high-speed local network, it simply writes to memory addresses which are in the memory space of the recipient processor. Similarly, the recipient processor, when it chooses to examine data which has been "sent" by another processor, reads its local memory (or physically- remote memory, in a hierarchical memory system) simply by the normal memory access mechanisms of that processor. In the MEMNet environment, there is a set of special memory controllers with adequate caching, connected together via a high-speed (200 megabit) ring. The caching provides a mechanism equivalent to the snooping caches of modern multiprocessors. During this research, we examined the architecture of software systems which would run in a MEMNet environment. Much to our surprise (although we should not have been surprised), the software implications of such a distributed environment are essentially non-existent. That is, a software system written to run on the fully distributed MEMNet environment is essentially, in all respects, identical to the same software system designed to run on a simple multiprocessor, shared-memory environment. The issues one must face in designing the architecture of future wide-area, high-speed networks ...... ...... In summary, this note suggests that we reexamine what we mean by "networking" in the future. It essentially suggests that networking is simply a special case of interprocess communication over a widely-distributed computer system, and thus can take advantage of technology already developed. _________________________________________________________________________ --------------- David J. Farber; Prof. of CS and EE, Director - Distributed Systems Labs. University of Pennsylvania/200 South 33rd Street/Philadelphia, PA 19104-6389 Tele: 215-898-9508; FAX: 215-274-8192