In this paper, “Martini,” a network interface controller chip for our original network called RHiNET is described. Martini is designed to provide high-bandwidth and low-latency communication with small overhead. To obtain high performance communication, protected user-level zero-copy RDMA communication functions are completely implemented by a hardwired logic. Also, to reduce the communication latency efficiently, we have proposed PIO-based communication mechanisms called “On-the-fly (OTF)” and have implemented them on Martini. The evaluation results show that Martini connected to a 64bit/66MHz PCI-bus achieves 470MByte/s maximum bidirectional bandwidth and 1.74 μsec minimum latency on host-to-host memory copying.

RHiNET-2/NI is a network interface for a parallel and distributed computing system with network connected PCs. The core of the network interface is an ASIC network controller chip Martini, which provides low-latency and large-bandwidth communication. Evaluation results show that it achieves almost full bandwidth of the 66MHz/64bit PCI bus, which is much larger than that of Myrinet-2000. The performance of a small prototype parallel system achieves almost linear speed up.