QUIC: a quality of service network interface layer for communication in NOWs

This project explores the development of a hardware/software infrastructure to enable the provision of quality of service (QoS) guarantees in high performance networks used to configure clusters of workstations/PCs. These networks of workstations (NOWs) have emerged as a viable high performance computational vehicle and are also being called upon to support access to multimedia datasets. Example applications include Web servers, video-on-demand servers, immersive environments, virtual meetings, multi-player 3-D games, interactive simulations, and collaborative design environments. Such applications must often share the interconnect with traditional compute intensive parallel/distributed applications that are usually driven by latency requirements in contrast to jitter, loss rate, or throughput requirements. The challenge is to develop a communication infrastructure that effectively manages the network resources to enable the diverse QoS requirements to be met. The major components of QUIC include: use of powerful, processors embedded in the network interfaces; scheduling paradigms for concurrently satisfying distinct QoS requirements over multiple streams; re-configurable hardware support to enable complex scheduling decisions to be made in the desired time frames; and a flexible and extensible virtual communication machine that provides a uniform interface for dynamically adding hardware/software functionality to the network interfaces (NIs). This paper reviews the goals, approach and current status of this project.