A low latency high bandwidth network interface prototype for PC cluster

A high performance network interface prototype for PC clusters called DIMMnet-1 that can be directly plugged into a DIMM slot of a PC is presented. By using both a low latency AOTF (atomic on-the-fly) sending and a high bandwidth BOTF (block on-the-fly) sending, it can overcome the overhead caused by standard I/O bus such as a PCI bus. Currently, two types of DIMMnet-1 prototype boards (providing optical and electrical network interface) equipped with a network interface controller chip Martini are available. They can be plugged into a 100 MHz DIMM slot of a PC with Pentium 3, Pentium 4 or Athlon. Experimental evaluation results of communication performance with the AOTF sending on a real system are shown. Estimated bandwidth with the BOTF sending is also shown.