Performance Evaluation of Soft RoCE over 1 Gigabit Ethernet

Ethernet is most influential & widely used technology in the world. With the growing demand of low latency & high throughput technologies like InfiniBand and RoCE have evolved with unique features viz. RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access). RDMA is an effective technology, which is used for reducing system load & improves the performance. InfiniBand is a well known technology, which provides high-bandwidth and lowlatency and makes optimal use of in-built features like RDMA. With the rapid evolution of InfiniBand technology and Ethernet lacking the RDMA and zero copy protocol, the Ethernet community has came out with a new enhancements that bridges the gap between InfiniBand and Ethernet. By adding the RDMA and zero copy protocol to the Ethernet a new networking technology is evolved called RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE). RoCE is a standard released by the IBTA standardization body to define RDMA protocol over Ethernet. With the emergence of lossless Ethernet, RoCE uses InfiniBand efficient transport to provide the platform for deploying RDMA technology in mainstream data centres over 10GigE, 40GigE and beyond. RoCE provide all of the InfiniBand benefits transport benefits and well established RDMA ecosystem combined with converged Ethernet. In this paper, we evaluate the heterogeneous Linux cluster, having multi nodes with fast interconnects i.e. gigabit Ethernet & Soft RoCE. This paper presents the heterogeneous Linux cluster configuration & evaluates its performance using Intel’s MPI Benchmarks. Our result shows that Soft RoCE is performing better than Ethernet in various performance metrics like bandwidth, latency & throughput.