Up and Down the Network Stack

Romley - Significant Performance Gain

Romley's arrived - and for those who've been running prev. Sandy Bridge chipsets, there's not a huge suprise, other than to point out the fact that platform latency at with high message rates is greatly improved and peak message rates are stunning.

Here's some performance data showing the uplift achieved moving from Westmere to Romley using the 6122F NICs (our super faster new NIC). This is for a single thread / stream running the sfnt-stream benchmark . As you can see on a Westmere latency starts to ratchet up at around 2Mpps, but stays very flat on the Romley (we used a 3.1Ghz with slow DDR1333 RAM).  Still sub-5us at 4Mpps.

 

 

The Romley platform also shows off the very high message rates achievable with the 6122F - we measured a huge 20Mpps RX with both ports at socket-level/user-space using 4 threads active.

Sinking line-rate min packet size is also very achievable - welcome to the world of affordable high precision packet capture ...!

 

End of the World -- Didn't Happen Last Week

Inheriting the name Solarflare as a company name means that we get the opportunity to make conversation every time there's a Solar event .. and I do so love the hysterical http://www.solarstormwarning.com/

and stuff like ..

Mar 9, 2012 – Earth braced itself for the worst this evening as the largest solar flare in five years sent charged particles speeding towards us at 600 miles per ...

But I must admit that the Feb 2012 issue of IEEE Spectrum caused me to nearly spill my beer. John Kappenman's article makes some very pertinent points:

- The last big one was 1921, well before our dependance on electrical infrastructure.

        Telegraph operators were stunned by arcs of electricity leaping from their equipment. Other enterprising operators disconnected the batteries, reconnected the telegraph armature directly to ground, and were able to continue working with just the "celestial" current flowing through their lines.

- Power grids are currently not protected against geomagnetically induced currents.

- In particular EHV transformers are susceptible, but are not stockpiled (they cost $10M each) and can not be quickly manufactured.

So the next big one,  could cause a grid failure which assuming civilisation without electricity didn't fail in the meantime would take 3-5 years to repair.

Erm and apparently protecting these transformers isn't particularly expernsive or difficult. Just that the utility companies can't be bothered to guard against the end of civilisation.

You know what - I'd seriously think about dropping a line to your locally elected official.

 

Surf Your Lake

Swimming in Lake Michigan is actually quite nice (although not at this time of the year). However the evil life guards who terrorise peaceful swimmers are not. I've had stand up arguments ... quite literally since at the time I was getting ordered back to the shore, the water wasnt yet waist deep!

So I've got a lot of sympathy for RexFloodstrom who was arrested for surfing.

http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2012/02/16/surfer-arrested-at-oak-street-beach-gets-community-service/

 

 

Wow, what's that lurking under the new heatsink

 

This is the awesome new 6x22 NIC. Looks the business. Doubles the internal packet processing performance of the 5x22 NICs - you'll really see the effects on SandyBridge architecture machines. Significantly lower latency at all packet rates . Will sink line rate min packet size sustained to user-space with OpenOnload and sustains at 18Mpps with both ports active and running multiple streams.