• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.31 no.5_6
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• pp.371-378
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• 2004

This paper presents the implementation and performance of the HVIA-GE card, which is a hardware implementation of the Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA) based on Gigabit Ethernet. The HVIA-GE card is a 32-bit/33MHz PCI adapter containing an FPGA for the VIA protocol engine and a Gigabit Ethernet chip set to construct a high performance physical network. HVIA-GE performs virtual-to-physical address translation, Doorbell, and send/receive completion operations in hardware without kernel intervention. In particular, the Address Translation Table (ATT) is stored on the local memory of the HVIA-GE card, and the VIA protocol engine efficiently controls the address translation process by directly accessing the ATT. As a result, the communication overhead during send/receive transactions is greatly reduced. Our experimental results show the maximum bandwidth of 93.7MB/s and the minimum latency of 11.9${\mu}\textrm{s}$. In terms of minimum latency HVIA-GE performs 4.8 times and 9.9 times faster than M-VIA and TCP/IP, respectively, over Gigabit Ethernet. In addition, the maximum bandwidth of HVIA-GE is 50.4% and 65% higher than M-VIA and TCP/IP respectively.