Initial end-to-end performance evaluation of 10-Gigabit Ethernet

We present an initial end-to-end performance evaluation of Intel's® 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) network interface card (or adapter). With appropriate optimizations to the configurations of Linux, TCP, and the 10 GbE adapter, we achieve over 4 Gb/s throughput and 21 μs end-to-end latency between applications in a local-area network despite using less capable, lower-end PCs. These results indicate that 10 GbE may also be a cost-effective solution for system-area networks in commodity clusters, data centers, and web-server farms as well as wide-area networks in support of computational and data grids.