An Analysis of QoS Provisioning for Sockets Direct Protocol vs. IPoIB over Modern InfiniBand Networks

The introduction of quality of service (QoS) features for socket-based communication over InfiniBand networks provides the opportunity to enact service differentiation for traditional socket-based applications over high performance networks for the first time. The effectiveness of such techniques in providing control over the quality of service that individual connections experience is important in managing traffic in modern data centers. In this paper, we quantitatively analyze the performance benefits of QoS provisioning in InfiniBand networks for sockets direct protocol (SDP) and IPoIB. We find that QoS provisioning can provide prioritized service for sockets-based streams, with more apparent impact on SDP traffic than IPoIB.