This paper presents an initial end-to-end performance evaluation of Intel's 10-Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) network interface card (NIC). With appropriate optimizations to the configurations of TCP and the 10GbE NIC, we achieve over 4-Gb/s throughput and 20-us end-to-end latency between applications in a local-area network despite using less capable, lower-end PCs. These results indicate that 10GigE 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.
Keywords:
Protocol processing hardware
High speed packet processing engines
Cluster computing