Measuring the Impact of Alternative Parallel Process Architectures on Communication Subsystem Performance

A communication subsystem consists of protocol functions and operating system mechanisms that support the implementation and execution of protocol stacks. To effectively parallelize a communication subsystem, careful consideration must be given to the process architecture used to structure multiple processing elements. A process architecture binds one or more processing elements with the protocol tasks and messages associated with protocol stacks in a communication subsystem. This paper outlines the two fundamental types of process architectures (task-based and message-based) and describes performance experiments conducted on three representative examples of these two types of process architectures – Layer Parallelism, which is a task-based process architecture, and Message-Parallelism and Connectional Parallelism, which are message-based process architectures. These experiments measure the impact of the process architecture on connectionless and connection-oriented protocol stacks (based upon UDP and TCP) in a shared-memory multi-processor operating system. The results from these experiments indicate that the choice of process architecture significantly affects communication subsystem performance.