Implementation of MP_Lite for the VI Architecture
Ames Lab., Ames, IA (United States), Weiyi Chen, USDOE Office of Science (US) · 2001
MP_Lite is a light weight message-passing library designed to deliver the maximum performance to applications in a portable and user friendly manner. The Virtual Interface (VI) architecture is a user-level communication protocol that bypasses the operating system to provide much better performance than traditional network architectures. By combining the high efficiency of MP_Lite and high performance of the VI architecture, they are able to implement a high performance message-passing library that has much lower latency and better throughput. The design and implementation of MP_Lite for M-VIA, which is a modular implementation of the VI architecture on Linux, is discussed in this thesis. By using the eager protocol for sending short messages, MP_Lite M-VIA has much lower latency on both Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet. The handshake protocol and RDMA mechanism provides double the throughput that MPICH can deliver for long messages. MP_Lite M-VIA also has the ability to channel-bonding multiple network interface cards to increase the potential bandwidth between nodes. Using multiple Fast Ethernet cards can double or even triple the maximum throughput without increasing the cost of a PC cluster greatly.