HiTrans: An FPGA-Based Gateway Design and Implementation in HPC Environments

Abstract

Infiniband and 10 Gbps Ethernet are two main high speed interconnect technologies adopted by High Performance Computing Environment, Ethernet is currently pervasively leveraged by storage devices while Infiniband is commonly used for high speed transmission among compute nodes, this distinction introduces interoperation between two heterogeneous networks which necessitate gateways, traditional software-based storage gateways show shortcomings in terms of high CPU utilization, long processing latency and poor performance, ASIC-based gateways overcome the above drawback but do not own enough programmability which enables flexible operations. This paper designs and implements an FPGA-based storage gateway called HiTrans to connect Infiniband and Ethernet in HPC environments based on EoIB technology, our main contributions focus on proposing the core processing procedure of HiTrans, and a static address mapping algorithm supporting fast protocol conversion between heterogeneous networks which boosts packet processing capability of storage gateway and reduces storage I/O latency. Experiment result has shown that performance of Hi-Trans can reach line-rate forwarding from Infiniband to Ethernet which is 3 times higher than traditional software-based implementation.