Abstract

Accessing network adapters directly from user-space applications improves performance dramatically, and this technique has been used for many years in the HPC space where it was invented. Recently it has become possible to accelerate mainstream applications that use the standard sockets interfaces and standard protocols. This environment throws up some serious challenges, such as the exec() call which blows away all user-level state! In this seminar I’ll show how Solarflare’s OpenOnload stack has solved this and other hard problems in user-level networking.

Bio: David Riddoch is Chief Architect at Solarflare, which he co-founded in July 2002. David is the architect of OpenOnload, Solarflare’s OS-bypass network stack, which delivers ultra high performance without requiring changes to applications. David oversees the design and implementation of Solarflare’s software and hardware interfaces, and still gets to write some code!