Recently, the second Student Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) Programming Competition unveiled its winning list, 7 out of 29 teams won the contest. The contest was hold by High Performance Computing Advisory Council (HPC Advisory Council). USTC team won the first prize with the highest total score.
USTC team was supervised by Prof. AN Hong, consisting of three sophomores RUAN Zhenyuan and YIN Yu from School of Computer Science, CHEN Weikeng from School of Information Science, and two graduates CHEN Junshi and YAO Wenjun. The equipment used in the competition was supported by Sugon Inc., which has long university-industry cooperation with USTC. In the competition, each team was required to transform traditional Socket-based applications to RDMA verbs-based, fulfilling the requirements of being able to run in the network that supports RDMA.
USTC team submitted the source code, executables and technique report, in which they compared the performance before and after the changes and explained the reasons underlying the improvements. After the committee examined the programs, reports and a remote or face-to-face debate, USTC is the winner with the highest scores.
RDMA is a key technology for many kinds of network-based software. Conventional TCP/IP technique is inefficient and demands considerable resources in the data transmission. RDMA allows exchanging data between the memory and storage devices in the remote hosts directly, without intervention of any other computers, caches or operation systems. Thus, it reduces the burden on the bandwidth and other computer resource, especially on the involved operation systems. RDMA has premising future in high performance computing, cloud computing, big data, database, and high frequency trading etc.
(LI Yang, School of Computer Science and Technology)
