Packet processing in the TCP/IP stack at multi-Gigabit data rates occupies a significant portion of the system overhead. Though there are several techniques to reduce the packet processing overhead on the sender-side, the receiver-side continues to remain as a bottleneck. I/O Acceleration Technology (I/OAT) developed by Intel is a set of features particularly designed to reduce the receiver-side packet overhead. This paper studies the benefits of the I/OAT technology by extensive evaluations

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... ough micro-benchmarks as well as evaluations on two different application domains: (1) A multi-tier data-center environment and (2) A Parallel Virtual File System (PVFS). Our micro-benchmark results show that I/OAT results in 38% lower overall CPU utilization in comparison with traditional communication. Due to this reduced CPU utilization, I/OAT delivers better performance and increased network bandwidth. Our experimental results with data-centers and file systems reveal that I/OAT can improve the total number of transactions processed by 14% and throughput by 12%, respectively. In addition, I/OAT can sustain larger number of concurrent threads (up to a factor of 4 as compared to non-I/OAT) in a data-center environment, thus increasing the scalability of the servers.