Evaluating Implementation Overheads

Our analysis shows that IRN is well within the limits of feasibility, with small chip area and NIC memory requirements and minor bandwidth overhead. We also validated our analysis through extensive discussions with two commercial NIC vendors (including Mellanox); both vendors confirmed that the IRN design can be easily implemented on their hardware NICs. Inspired by the results presented in this paper, Mellanox is considering implementing a version of IRN in their next release.