Source-aware Interrupt Scheduling for Parallel I/O Systems

In “ Source-aware Interrupt Scheduling for Parallel I/O Systems,” Hongbo Zou, Xian-He Sun, Siyuan Ma, and Xi Duan in the Department of Computer Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology describe a technique for grouping interrupts in a multicore system associated with the same I/O request together on the same core.

In a source-aware affinity interrupt-scheduling scheme they created and prototype system called SAIs, the methodology shows a 23.57 percent improvement in a 3-Gigabit NIC environment. In the optimal case without the NIC bottleneck, the bandwidth improvement increases to 53.23 percent.