Berkeley VIA Project
An Investigation of the Virtual Interface Architecture
Introduction
In an effort to standardize the variety of high-performance
research networking architectures presently
available for clusters, industry leaders Microsoft, Compaq and Intel have
jointely developed the
Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA). At its heart is the concept of a
user-level interface directly to
the network hardware that bypasses traditional operating system mechanisms:
I.E. the virtual
interface. The Berkeley VIA project seeks to develop the VIA architecture for
use as the cluster
networking layer for the Millennium Project. The objectives are threefold:
1) Develop high quality
VIA implementations for multiple OS/Hardware platforms, 2) Perform detailed
analysis of the
implementation to determine the performance characteristics of VIA and
3) Investigate possible
improvements to the VI Architecture.
Papers and Presentations
Philip Buonadonna
"High-Performance Network Attached I/O for Distributed Systems"
[HTML]
Philip Buonadonna,
Andrew Geweke, "An Implementation
and Analysis of the Virtual Interface Architecture", University of California
at Berkeley, Computer Science Department, Berkeley, California, May 1998 [
PostScript,
Presentation Slides]
Philip Buonadonna, Andrew Geweke, David Culler, "An Implementation and Analysis of the Virtual Interface Architecture", Proceedings of SC98, Orlando, Florida, November 1998 [ HTML, Presentation Slides]
Distributions
Other Software
Other Implementations
Side-by-Side Comparison of Implementations
Resources and Links
Please send updates to
Philip Buonadonna.
Computer Science Division
Univeristy of California at Berkeley
June 1999