Overview

In December of 1997, Intel, Compaq, and Microsoft, with the help of over 100 contributing industry organizations, published the Virtual Interface Architecture Specification to provide an industry standard interface for high performance cluster communications.

Clusters of standard servers are becoming a cost-effective alternative to large mainframe computers, and high performance communication between servers is required for clusters to scale in capacity and performance. The Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA) provides the standard for efficient cluster communications required to achieve a critical mass of cluster middleware and application development.

How does the Virtual Interface Architecture meet these needs? And what are its fundamental underlying concepts? How can applications benefit from the capabilities of VIA? This book is intended as the definitive guide to answer these questions.

What s the Problem?

Clusters are an integral part of the computing resources that power the Internet. Clusters can provide the large scale distributed computing resources necessary for sophisticated e-commerce applications. But scalable cluster computing cannot realize its full potential without high performance intra-cluster communications. Although standard networking hardware promises to deliver ever-faster data rates, existing application interfaces limit its effectiveness. VIA remedies this problem by drastically improving the efficiency of the interface between the application and the network.

Prior to the development of VIA, multiple high speed System Area Networks (SANs) had been developed to solve the problem of high performance communication for scalable clusters. But the interface and operation of these networks were unique and proprietary. This lack of standardization limited the number of...