Net/SLE: A Java-based user-customizable virtual network interface

摘要

We describe U-Net/SLE (Safe Language Extensions), a user-level network interface architecture which enables per-application customization of communication seman- tics through downloading of user extension applets, imple- mented as Java classfiles, to the network interface. This ar- chitecture permits applications to safely specify code to be executed within the NI on message transmission and recep- tion. By leveraging the existing U-Net model, applications may implement protocol code at the user level, within the NI, or using some combination of the two. Our current im- plementation, using the Myricom Myrinet interface and a small Java Virtual Machine subset, allows host communi- cation overhead to be reduced and improves the overlap of communication and computation during protocol processing.