Direct Deposit Communication in CORBA over Gigabit Ethernet
Michael Keller
Diploma Thesis Winter 1999/2000
Supervisors: Christian Kurmann, Prof. T. Stricker
Institute for Computer Systems, ETH Zürich
Objectives
Today, the bandwidth of computer networks is increasing steadily. As the
operating systems and applications used in these networks are not offering
special support for highspeed networking, there is no simple and portable
solution to make use of the bandwidth offered to increase the communication
performance between the applications. Usually, the only solution available is to
provide methods to directly access the network hardware inside the application.
The disadvantage of this solution is that it leads to highly
platform dependent applications that often cannot be adapted to be used outside
the
cluster they have been developed for.
Results
The goal of this diploma thesis was to show a more elegant approach to solve the
problem shown above. The strategy chosen was to integrate the means of
highspeed network access into a development environment for distributed
applications (Middleware). The modifications done should allow an application
programmer to transfer data over a highspeed network only by using a modified
set of constructs available in the standard development environment.
More specifically this was achieved by integrating an interface to a performance
optimized TCP/IP stack with adapted Gigabit Ethernet drivers into the CORBA 2.3
compliant MICO Object Request Broker (ORB) and environment.
Further, a special data type was created.
This data type can be used the same way for inter - object communication
as the standard CORBA data type it was derived from, but outside
the scope of the programmer it is treated in a performance optimised way, thus
allowing high speed network communication.
Network performance benchmarks that were done with the modified MICO ORB
showed that its data throughput was similiar to the troughput of the bare TCP/IP
stack it was based on. This means that for the use of Gigabit Ethernet a
performance gain of up to 1000\% aginst the unmodified version of MICO. For
large data transfers a throughput of about 500 Mbit/sec was measured.
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ETH Zürich: Department of Computer Science
Comments to Christian Kurmann <kurmann@inf.ethz.ch>
Date 03-10-1999