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Supporting iWARP Compatibility and Features for
Regular Network Adapter
P.Balaji, H.-W.Jin,
K.Vaidyanathan, D.K.Panda
RAIT Workshop
IEEE
International Conference on Cluster Computing (Cluster 2005)
Boston, Massachusetts, USA, September 26, 2005
With several recent initiatives in the protocol
ooading technology present on network adapters, the user market is now
distributed amongst various technology levels including regular Ethernet
network adapters, TCP Ooad Engines (TOEs) and the recently introduced iWARP-capable
networks. While iWARPcapable networks provide all the
features provided by their predecessors (TOEs and
regular Ethernet network adapters) and a new richer programming interface, they
lack with respect to backward compatibility. In this aspect, two important
issues needto be considered. First, not all network
adapters support iWARP; thus, software compatibility
for regular network adapters (which have no ooaded
protocol stack) with iWARP capable network adapters
needs to be achieved. Second, several applications on top of regular Ethernet
as well as TOE basedadapters have been written withthe sockets interface; rewriting such applications
using the new iWARP interface is cumbersome and
impractical. Thus, it is desirable to have an interface which provides a
two-fold benet: (i)itallows existingapplications
to run directly without any modications and (ii) it
exposes the richer feature set of iWARP to the
applications to be utilized with minimal modications.
In this paper, we design and implement a software stack to handle these issues.
Specically, (i)the software stackemulates the
functionality of the iWARP stack in software to
provide compatibility for regular Ethernet adapters with iWARP
capable networks and (ii) it provides applications with an extended sockets
interface that provides the traditional sockets functionality as well as
functionality extended with the rich iWARP features.
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