A High Performance Message-Passing System for Network of Workstations

  • Authors:

  • Sung-Yong Park;Salim Hariri

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244-4100 sypark@cat.syr.edu;Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244-4100 hariri@cat.syr.edu

  • Venue:
  • The Journal of Supercomputing - Special issue: high performance distributed computing
  • Year:
  • 1997

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Abstract

With the proliferation of Network of Workstations (NOW) environment,there has been a great demand for a high performance message-passing systemto implement High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC) applications overNOW environment. NYNET (ATM wide area network testbed in New York state)Communication System (NCS) is a multithreaded message-passing systemdeveloped at Syracuse University that provides low-latency andhigh-throughput communication services over the Asynchronous Transfer Mode(ATM) based HPDC environment. NCS provides High Performmance ApplicationCommunication Interface (HPI) to support applications that demandhigh-throughput and low-latency communication services.This paper outlines the general architecture of NCS and presents theimplementation approach of NCS HPI over an ATM network. This interface hasbeen developed by modifying Fore Systems‘ ATM Application ProgrammingInterface (API) and its device driver. NCS HPI uses read/writetrap routinesto bypass traditional operating system calls and kernel-level communicationinterface (e.g. UNIX System V Streams). It reduces latency, data transfertime, and avoid using traditional communication protocols (e.g., TCP/IP).This substantially improves the communication performance.