The IEEE Standard for Gigabit Networking was accepted in June 1998 and ratified as IEEE 802.3z. This standard uses considers an optical cable for signal transmission. One year later a new standard for Gigabit Ethernet over unshielded twisted pair of the 5th category was certified under the name 802.3ab. Nowadays, there are a couple of younger and older studies about Gigabit Ethernet technology and performance. This Meta Analysis is intended to put the main results altogether into one document suitable for a proper choice of gigabit networking equipment for cluster computers.

The NetCOPE framework has proven itself as a viable framework for rapid development of hardware accelerated wire-speed network applications using Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). To meet the current and future requirements of such applications the NetCOPE platform has to catch up with upcoming 400 Gigabit Ethernet. Otherwise, it may become deprecated in following years. Catching up with 400 Gigabit Ethernet brings many challenges bringing necessity of completely different way of thinking. Multiple network packets have to be processed each clock cycle requiring a new concept of processing. Advanced memory management is used to ensure constant memory complexity with respect to the number of DMA channels without any impact on performance. Thanks to that, even more than 256 completely independent DMA channels are feasible with current technology. A lot of effort was made to create the framework as generic as possible allowing deployment of 400 Gigabit Ethernet and beyond. Emphasis is put on communication between the framework and host computer via PCI Express technology. Multiple Ethernet ports are also considered. The proposed system is prepared to be deployed on the family of COMBO cards, used as a reference platform.

This work covers the implementation of a raw Ethernet communication module for the Open MPI message passing library. Thereby it focuses on both the reduction of the communication latency for small messages and maximum possible compatibility. Especially the need for particular network devices, adapted network device drivers or kernel patches is avoided. The work is divided into three major parts: First, the networking subsystem of the version 2.6 Linux kernel is analyzed. Second, an Ethernet protocol family is implemented as a loadable kernel module, consisting of a basic datagram protocol (EDP), providing connection-less and unreliable datagram transport, and a streaming protocol (ESP), providing connection-oriented, sequenced and reliable byte streams. The protocols use the standard device driver interface of the Linux kernel for data transmission and reception. Their services are made available to user-space applications through the standard socket interface. Last, the existing Open MPI TCP communication module is ported atop the ESP. With bare EDP/ESP sockets a message latency of about 30 us could be achieved for small messages, which compared to the TCP latency of about 40 us is a reduction of 25 %.