Switcherland: a QoS communication architecture for workstation clusters

Abstract

Computer systems have become powerful enough to process continuous data streams such as video or animated graphics. While processing power and communication bandwidth of today's systems typically are sufficient, quality of service (QoS) guarantees as required for handling such data types cannot be provided by these systems in adequate ways. We present Switcherland, a scalable communication architecture based on crossbar switches that provides QoS guarantees for workstation clusters in the form of reserved bandwidth and bounded transmission delays. Similar to the ATM technology Switcherland provides QoS guarantees with the help of service classes, that is, data transfers are characterized as variable bit rare traffic or constant bit rate traffic. However, unlike LAN technologies, Switcherland is optimized for cluster computing in that (i) it serves as a backplane interconnection fabric as well as a LAN, (ii) it extends support for service classes by also covering the end nodes of the network, (iii) it provides low latency in the order of one microsecond per switch, and (iv) it uses a communication model based on a global memory to simplify programming.