Abstract
A Network of Workstations (NOW) is emerging as a cost-effective solution to high performance computing. However, we need to lower the cost of communicating between the workstations to make this platform viable. With the advent of high-performance networks such as ATM and Myrinet, the physical network is no longer the communication bottleneck. Rather, the major overhead can now be attributed to software. This overhead is a direct result of the cost that a message incurs as it travels through different protection domains. We can alleviate this problem by allowing protected user-level access directly to the network, thereby eliminating the kernel from the critical path. This paper presents a description of the design, implementation and performance of a protected user-level messaging system over Myrinet, called MU-Net, that can handle multiple application processes concurrently. MU-Net has been implemented on the SUN Solaris 2.5 operating system.
This research is supported in part by a NSF Career Award MIP-9701475, EPA grant R825195-01-0, and equipment grants from NSF and IBM.
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Nagar, S., Seed, D., Sivasubramaniam, A. (1998). Implementing protected multi-user communication for Myrinet. In: Panda, D.K., Stunkel, C.B. (eds) Network-Based Parallel Computing Communication, Architecture, and Applications. CANPC 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1362. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0052205
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0052205
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