Design and implementation of a high-performance interconnection network: TH-Net

This paper provides a high performance interconnection network that can provide high bandwidth and low latency communication on a custom gigabit crossbar network. This implementation consists of the high-speed switch TH-Switch, the VIA-supported NIC TH-NIC and protocol software TH-VIA complied with VIA. TH-Switch uses circuit-switching technique instead of packet-switching to reduce the communication latency. The design and implementation of TH-Net's communication mechanism is based on the VIA specification that the data transferring can be performed directly at the user application level, bypassing the operating system kernel, to reduce the communication overhead. The design and implementation details are discussed in this paper.