Efficient Virtualization of High-Performance Network Interfaces

The architecture of modern computing systems is getting more and more parallel, in order to exploit more of the offered parallelism by applications and to increase the system's overall performance. This includes multiple cores per processor module, multi-threading techniques and the resurgence of interest in virtual machines. In spite of this amount of parallelism the network interface is typically available only once. If the network interface is not able to exploit the offered parallelism, it becomes a bottleneck limiting the system's overall performance. To overcome this situation a new virtualization method for network interface is proposed, relying on a speculative mechanism to enqueue work requests. It offers unconstrained and parallel access without any involvement of software instances, allowing to exploit any available parallelism. For an unrestricted use the I/O interface is not modified. Modern parallel computing systems and Virtual Machine environments can be significantly improved with this new virtualization technique.