PCI-express is commonly used for Interconnects within one machine or between machines in a server room. The protocol has limits for the maximum delays (and distance) allowed for data transfers. We want to explore the use of optical fibre to transfer data over larger distances (inter-city) using a modified PCIe protocol.
Industry partners for this thesis will be Dolphin Interconnect and UNINETT
The tasks will include:
- Explore the prerequisites for long-haul PCIe
- Evaluate the excisting prototype, and see where optimizations can be performed.
- Evaluate the possibilities of using a hardware based network processor compared to low-level OS optimizations.
- Whether the possibilities of using transfer encapsulation (like MPLS).
Measure the performance of the working prototype.
- Transfer Latency
- Transfer Bandwidth
- Feasibility of implementation and deployment
- Complexity of implementation and deployment
Overall goal:
Optimize a working prototype for inter-city PCIe RDMA transfers.
Learning outcome:
- Learn about the PCIe protocol.
- Learn about low-level OS optimizations
- Learn about high BW, low latency Internet transfers.
- Learn about advanced retransmission avoidance in best-effort IP networks.
- Learn about evaluation of systems and protocols.
Qualifications / recommended background:
- Operating systems experience.
- Systems programming experience.
- Programming language: C for implementation, Scripting for test-setup and result analysis.