Evaluation of a Fabric Management Mechanism for Advanced Switching in Presence of Traffic

Recent years, computer performance has been significantly increased. As a consequence, data I/O systems have become bottlenecks within systems. In order to alleviate this problem, Advanced Switching Interconnect was proposed as a new standard for future high-performance interconnects. The Advanced Switching specification establishes a fabric management infrastructure, which is in charge of maintaining the connectivity between fabric endpoints after fabric initialization and each time a topological change takes place. Once the change has been detected, a fabric manager must discover the new topology, obtain a new set of valid fabric paths, and distribute them to the fabric endpoints. This paper evaluates a first implementation for this management mechanism, by analyzing the influence of application traffic on its performance, and the way in which network service can be affected by the change assimilation process.