Scalability limitations of VIA-based technologies in supporting MPI
Ronald B. Brightwell, Arthur B. ‘Barney’ Maccabe · OSTI OAI (U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information) · 2000
This paper analyzes the scalability limitations of networking technologies based on the Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA) in supporting the runtime environment needed for an implementation of the Message Passing Interface. We present an overview of the important characteristics of VIA and an overview of the runtime system being developed as part of the Computational Plant (Cplant) project at Sandia National Laboratories. We discuss the characteristics of VIA that prevent implementations based on this system to meet the scalability and performance requirements of Cplant.