Study of the medium message performance of BIP/Myrinet

L. Prylli and B. Tourancheau (1998) presented the BIP low level communication protocols for Myrinet programmable NICs. On one side BIP has proven that a very small latency and a very large throughput can be delivered that surpass other communication layers for Myrinet. On another side hardware implementations like Giganet or SCI show very good performance for medium size messages. Our aim in this paper is to study how the programmable NICs can compare with the hardware solutions for the medium size messages. We conducted a very precise model of the pipeline behavior directed by the NIC program in order to identify the bottlenecks. The results show that the pipeline quality is very important. We develop an adaptive strategy as described by K. Yocum et al. (1998). We then introduce it in BIP. Experiments show up to a twofold gain over the previous BIP and reach the performance above the hardware solutions.