@InProceedings{magoutis:direct,
  author = {Kostas Magoutis and Salimah Addetia and Alexandra Fedorova and
  Margo I. Seltzer},
  title = {Making the Most Out of Direct-Access Network Attached Storage},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the USENIX FAST '03 Conference on File and
  Storage Technologies},
  year = {2003},
  month = {April},
  publisher = {USENIX Association},
  address = {San Francisco, CA},
  URL = {http://www.usenix.org/events/fast03/tech/magoutis.html},
  keywords = {file systems, rpc optimizations, rdma, multi-client workload,
  small I/O, pario-bib},
  abstract = {The performance of high-speed network-attached storage
  applications is often limited by end-system overhead, caused primarily by
  memory copying and network protocol processing. In this paper, we examine
  alternative strategies for reducing overhead in such systems. We consider
  optimizations to remote procedure call (RPC)-based data transfer using either
  remote direct memory access (RDMA) or network interface support for
  pre-posting of application receive buffers. We demonstrate that both
  mechanisms enable file access throughput that saturates a 2Gb/s network link
  when performing large I/Os on relatively slow, commodity PCs. However, for
  multi-client workloads dominated by small I/Os, throughput is limited by the
  per-I/O overhead of processing RPCs in the server. For such workloads, we
  propose the use of a new network I/O mechanism, Optimistic RDMA (ORDMA).
  ORDMA is an alternative to RPC that aims to improve server throughput and
  response time for small I/Os. We measured performance improvements of up to
  32\% in server throughput and 36\% in response time with use of ORDMA in our
  prototype.}
}