Performance of high-speed network I/O subsystems: case study of a fibre channel network

Emerging high-speed networks provide several hundred megabits per second to several gigabits per second of raw communication bandwidth. However, the maximum achievable throughput available to the end-user or application is quite limited. In order to fully utilize the network bandwidth and to improve the performance at the application level, a careful examination of I/O subsystems is essential. In this paper, we study one emerging high-speed network, the Fibre Channel network. The objectives of this study are: 1) to understand how the I/O subsystem relates to network operations, 2) to evaluate and analyze the performance of such a subsystem, and 3) to propose possible approaches for improving the maximum achievable bandwidth. We will show (by simply modifying device driver code) a 75% maximum achievable bandwidth improvement. Other ways of improving network performance are also discussed.