Active SANs: Hardware Support for Integrating Computation and Communication

This paper explores the view that the SAN network infrastructure can be an active computational entity capable of supporting certain classes of data intensive computations effectively during communication. The performance is achieved via the use of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) in the network interfaces (NIs). This paper describes the programming model and the design of a prototype hardware/software implementation using commercial FPGA devices coupled with Myrinet. An active messages style of programming is used to support applicationtransparent, dynamic reconfiguration of the FPGA hardware to accommodate different computations over time. Performance evaluation of this implementation quantifies the overheads and sources of performance improvement.