Bobnet

Bobnet is a low-latency message-passing protocol designed for use as the high performance networking software in a loosely coupled cluster of computers. It features zero-copy sends directly from user-space data, and one-copy receives. Bobnet was especially designed to operate as efficiently on commodity networking components (e.g., generic 10 or 100 Mb/s ethernet) as it does on faster, more expensive network interface devices (e.g., Myrinet). Support for multiple higher-layer protocols is provided, including MPLite, TCP, and the emerging VIA standard. Transmission reliability can be selected on a per-communication channel basis, ranging from none to full receipt acknowledgment. Performance figures for fast ethernet are 96 Mb/s bandwidth, and under 30 us one-way latency. Implementations for Linux and FreeBSD are available.

Note that Bobnet is no longer in active development, as the authors have moved on to other projects. Refer to M-VIA for another VIA over ethernet implementation, which was still changing at the end of 2000.

Paper

Bobnet: high-performance message passing for commodity networking components
Chris Csanady and Pete Wyckoff
Proceedings of PDCN '98, Brisbane, Australia, December 1998
PDF

Bobnet is a low-latency message-passing protocol designed for use as the high performance networking software in a loosely coupled cluster of computers. It features zero-copy sends directly from user-space data, and one-copy receives. Bobnet was especially designed to operate as efficiently on commodity networking components (e.g., generic 10 or 100 Mb/s ethernet) as it does on faster, more expensive network interface devices (e.g., Myrinet). Support for multiple higher-layer protocols is provided, including MPLite, TCP, and the emerging VIA standard. Transmission reliability can be selected on a per-communication channel basis, ranging from none to full receipt acknowledgment. Performance figures for fast ethernet are 96 Mb/s bandwidth, and under 30 us one-way latency. Implementations for Linux and FreeBSD are available.

Code

Note this was developed at Sandia National Labs, hence their legal disclaimer:

Sandia National Laboratories dedicates whatever right, title or interest it may have in this software to the public. Although no license from Sandia is needed to copy and use this software, copying and using the software might infringe the rights of others. This software is provided as-is. SANDIA DISCLAIMS ANY WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED.

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Last updated 18 Mar 2005.