LogP Quantified: The Case for Low Overhead Local Area Networks

 


Kimberly Keeton, Thomas Anderson, and David Patterson. LogP Quantified: The Case for Low Overhead Local Area Networks. Proc. 1995 Hot Interconnects III Conference, August 1995.


Abstract:

As we make an ongoing transition to switch-based networks, we find that the marketing focus is link bandwidth.  This paper argues that many other factors, such as overhead, latency, communication pattern, message sizes, and contention contribute to overall communication performance.  Our findings indicate that overhead is the dominant factor in determining communication performance, especially for request-response communication using small messages.  Furthermore, an important class of applications, namely NFS file systems and transaction processing database systems, will not be able to take advantage of increases in network bandwidth unless host protocol software overheads are also lowered.


Postscript