Dolphin SuperSockets

SuperSockets provides a fast and transparent way for any networked applications to dramatically improve performance. In combination with Dolphin Express hardware, application implemented with a sockets interface can take advantage of extremely low latency and high bandwidth.  SuperSockets is a Berkeley API compliant sockets interface that allows low overhead TCP/UDP/IP sockets to use Dolphin Express hardware.

This page describes the Linux version. Consult these pages for SuperSockets on Windows. 

The software is highly optimized to reduce system load (e.g. system interrupts) and uses both PIO and RDMA operations to implement most efficient transfers for all message sizes.

The major benefits are plug and play, high bandwidth, high availability, and much lower socket latency than network technologies like 10G Ethernet, 1G Ethernet, Infiniband and Myrinet.  Dolphin SuperSockets uses Dolphin Express Hardware remote memory access to implement a fast and reliable connection. An overview of the technology can be found in the Dolphin SuperSockets brochure.

 

Key Product Features

  • All applications will benefit from Dolphin Express without modification
  • 100% compliant with Linux Socket library, Berkeley Socket compliant
  • No OS patches or application modifications required.  Just install and run
  • Supports multiple adapters per host for increased fault tolerance and speed
  • Both TCP and UDP supported. UDP multicast/broadcast is not supported
  • Includes local loopback socket acceleraton up to 10 times faster than standard Linux
  • Automatic fail-over to redundant adapter in the case of network failure
  • Transparent Fail-over to Ethernet if the Dolphin Express connection is down.  Fail forward to Dolphin Express when the problem has been corrected
  • Supports hot-pluggable links for high availability operation
  • Easy to install
  • Supports both user space and kernel space clients
  • Full support for socket inheritance/duplication
  • Field prooven for various MPI libraries, MySQL, DRBD and Oracle RAC

Socket latency

Real benchmarks shows that a complete 1 byte socket send - socket receive is completed in 1.99us (Full round-trip in 3.98us). As far as we know, this is a new world record and appr. 10x times better than regular Gigabit Ethernet.

Worldclass Low latency compared to GigEthernet or Infiniband

 

Socket Throughput

Benchmarks using iperf shows more than 21000 megabit/s throughput using standard TCP_STREAM sockets over one single IXH adapter card running in PCI Express x8 Gen2 configuration.

 

Availability

SuperSockets is available for all popular Linux 2.6 - 3.x distributions and kernels for Intel and AMD x86 and x64 systems (32 and 64 bit installations).

 

Installation

All software are provided as rpm or deb packages for Linux. An installation scrip enables automatic cluster wide installation on all nodes. More details can be found in the download and installation guides section.