The development in Network

Performance
And it’s impact on the computing model of
tomorrow
The GRiD

• Named after the power-grid

• Sometimes referred to as the
information power grid
• Like the power-grid GRID should be
powered by large installations
– not individual generators
Philosophy

• Current ’Internet’ only allows access

to information
• The GRiD should provide access to
any desired resource
– CPU/SuperComputers
– Storage
– Applications
 Performance Improvement since
1988
6

Net Bandwidth

5
Improvement (orders of magnitude)

Disk Latency

1 Disk Bandwidth
Net Latency

0
Rules of the Game
Copenhagen-Stockholm
• 1988
– Latency 40 ms
– Bandwidth 64 kb/s
• 2005
– Latency 10 ms
– Bandwidth 10Gb/s
• Networking is much better
 Is There an Improvement?

Whether we have an improvement depend on our watch!

 Is There an Improvement?

Whether we have an improvement depend on our watch!

CPU
 Is There an Improvement?

Whether we have an improvement depend on our watch!

Outer
Clock

CPU
Inner
Clock
Rules of the Game
Copenhagen-Stockholm
• Using the inner clock
• 1988
– 1B: 0.8M CPU cycles
– 1GB: 2T CPU cycles
• 2005
– 1B: 39M CPU cycles
– 1GB: 3G CPU cycles
• Latency is much worse
• But bandwidth is much better
Rules of the Game
Harddrive-Memory
• Using the inner clock
• 1988
– 1B: 1M CPU cycles
– 1GB: 1G CPU cycles
• 2005
– 1B: 13M CPU cycles
– 1GB: 38G CPU cycles
• Hard-drives are also much worse
 Development as seen from the
CPU
3.5

3 Net Bandwidth

2.5

2
Improvement - orders of magnitude

1.5

0.5

-0.5

-1
Disk Latency
-1.5
Disk Bandwidth
Net Latency
-2
Why is GRID?

• Network bandwidth is now here

Bandwidth Development

10000

1000

100

10 LAN
Mb/s

WAN
1 Disk

0.1

0.01

0.001
1974 1980 1988 1992 1995 1997 2000 2003
Year
Transparent Remote File Access

• Huge input files incur a number of

problems:
– Download time vs. total execution time
– Job execution on the resource is delayed
– Storage requirements on resources
• Often only small scattered fragments
of input files are needed
• How about automatic on-demand
download of needed data?
 Example

int fd = open(“inputfile”, O_RDONLY);

while ((i=read(fd, &buffer, 2000)) >0){
/* process buffer */
}

User applications need not be

recompiled or rewritten!
Communication Protocol

• HTTP supports a “range” parameter in

get request:
GET /inputfile HTTP/1.1
HOST:
MiG_server.imada.sdu.dk
Range: bytes=2000-3000
• No range support in put requests
– In order to support writing to remote files,
a custom web server is developed
Overriding file-access

• Override a subset of file manipulating

routines:
– open, close, read, write,
seek, dup, sync, etc.
• Preload this library using the
LD_PRELOAD environment variable
– Requires user apps to be dynamically
linked
• Forward local file access to the
native file system using the dlfcn
library
Efficient Access

• Simple solution: general purpose block size

based on n/2-analysis
• Advanced solution: depends on the user
application:
– The nature of the application (sequential vs non-
sequential file access)
– The block size used in the application
• Introduce prefetching (1 block read-ahead)
• Adjust the block size dynamically based on
the prefetching and the time taken to
transfer a block
Experiments

• 4 experiments:
– Overhead: read a one byte file
– I/O intensive application: Checksum a 1 GB file
– I/O balanced application: Process a 1 GB file
– Partial file traversal: Search a 360 MB B+ tree for
a random key
• 3 test setups:
– Local execution
– Copy model
– Remote access model
Baseline Performance
100Mb net

Experiment Local Copy Remote

1B file 0.002 0.152 0.008
Checksum 50.11 130.1 114.3
Balanced 632.83 721.22 600.72
B+ Tree 0.002 30.692 0.0186
Latency tests

Latency
Odense 0 ms
Copenhagen 4 ms
Århus 9 ms
Aalborg 13 ms
Tromsø 32 ms
Canterbury 54 ms
Chania 88 ms
Checksum
Balanced
B+ Tree
True End of the PC?

• If we can eliminate the disk we

eliminate >60% of the errors in the PC
• But perhaps we don’t need the PC
– The average PC utilizes less that 5% of
its capacity (Source: Intel)
• Reality is that the PC is
– Much too powerful most of the time
– Not nearly powerful enough the rest of
the time
• So we eliminate the PC?
Bandwidth for Remote users

• A graphics intensive user

– Screen size: 1600x1400
– Frequency: 50Hz
– Color depth: 32b
– Compression 1:10
• Required bandwidth: 0.33 Gb/s
• Translates into 30 users per 10Gb line
Bandwidth for Remote users

• A typical user
– Screen size: 1280x1024
– Frequency: 30Hz
– Color depth: 24b
– Compression 1:100
• Required bandwidth: 0.008 Gb/s
• Translates into 1138 users per 10Gb
line
World of Tomorrow?

Resource

User
Dis
k GRID

GRID
Resource
The Grid Terminal
Grid terminal
But we have seen this before?

• Is this not just another thin client?

• No!
– Thin clients work against dedicated
servers
– Grid has no single point of failure
– And Grid has competition
Distributed Shared Memory
DSM Test – the problem…

Points Latency (us) Bandwidth

(MB/s)
SDU-SDU 130 63.0

NBI-NBI 250 95.3

SDU-NBI 1755 76.3

SDU-DIKU 1767 64.7

NBI-DIKU 3422 58.1

The Results
Conclusion and Predictions

• No reason to expect any change in

the development of performance
• Networks will be increasingly slower
• But bandwidth is limited only by
demand
• Grid will allow users to ignore
computer maintenance and backups
• Even individual home-users will join
Grid