QUIC: A Quality of Service Network Interface Layer for Communication in NOWs

This project explores the development of a hard-ware/software infrastructure to enable the provision of quality of service (QoS) guarantees in high performance networks used to conngure clusters of worksta-tions/PCs. These networks of workstations (NOWs) have emerged as a viable high performance computational vehicle and are also being called upon to support access to multimedia datasets. Example applications include Web servers, video-on-demand servers, im-mersive environments, virtual meetings, multi-player 3-D games, interactive simulations, and collaborative design environments. Such applications must often share the interconnect with traditional compute intensive parallel/distributed applications that are usually driven by latency requirements in contrast to jitter, loss rate, or throughput requirements. The challenge is to develop a communication infrastructure that effectively manages the network resources to enable the diverse QoS requirements to be met. The major components of QUIC include (1) use of powerful, processors embedded in the network interfaces, (2) scheduling paradigms for concurrently satisfying distinct QoS requirements over multiple streams, (3) re-conngurable hardware support to enable complex scheduling decisions to be made in the desired time frames, and (4) a exible and extensible virtual communication machine that provides a uniform interface for dynamically adding hardware/software functionality to the network interfaces (NIs). This papers reviews the goals, approach and current status of this project.