Low-cost Gigabit Ethernet at Work

Abstract

In this paper we report about the recently completed porting of the Genoa Active Message MAchine (GAMMA) to the Netgear GA620 Gigabit Ethernet adapter. Such device is a low-cost (less than 300 US dollars at the time of writing) Gigabit Ethernet adapter with a state-of-art internal architecture based on two programmable on-board processors and substantial amount of on-board RAM, which makes this product a very appealing, cheap alternative to Myrinet. A combination of low end-to-end latency (32 s) and high transmission throughput (103 MByte/s end-to-end) demonstrates the potential for Gigabit Ethernet lightweight protocols to yield messaging performance comparable to the best Myrinet protocols. This result is of interest, given the envisaged drop in cost of Gigabit Ethernet due to the forthcoming transition from fiber optic to UTP cabling and ever increasing mass market production of such standard interconnect.