Impact of Fragmentation Strategy on Ethernet Performance

Network fragmentation is the process of splitting a large amount of communication data into smaller fragments that comply with the Maximum Transmission Unit supported by the interconnect. We present a novel fragmentation approach which optimises communication fragmentation based on the amount of data remaining to be exchanged. Our fragmentation approach has up to 30% lower latency when exchanging data <2.MTU bytes across commodity store-and-forward networks than comparable other approaches. The fragmentation algorithm is employed as part of the communication system of a Message Passing FPGA cluster. Algorithm testing has been performed across this system as well as on standard PC computers in production network environments. These configurations show the applicability of the algorithm to real world systems and parallel computing platforms.