Fast Messages: Efficient, Portable Communication for Workstation Clusters and MPPs

  • Authors:
  • Scott Pakin;Vijay Karamcheti;Andrew A. Chien

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Parallel & Distributed Technology: Systems & Technology
  • Year:
  • 1997

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Abstract

Illinois Fast Messages is a low-level software messaging layer designed to meet the demands of high-performance network hardware. FM presents a portable architectural interface that is amenable to high-performance implementations on massively parallel computers and clusters of workstations. By providing key services-buffer management and ordered, reliable delivery-FM helps simplify and streamline higher-level communication layers. FM also decouples the processor and the network, passing control over scheduling communication processing to software built over FM. This, in turn, minimizes communication's impact on local computation performance (for example, by preserving cached data). The authors have built several implementations of the FM interface on the Cray T3D and a Myrinet-based workstation cluster. These implementations demonstrate that FM can deliver much of the underlying hardware's performance to both higher-level messaging layers and applications. FM's performance continues to improve with newer networking hardware and advances in the implementation techniques.