Fine grain parallel communication on general purpose LANs
Todd Mummert, Corey Kosak, Peter Steenkiste, Allan L. Fisher · 1996
Commodityworkstations connected by commodity networks are increasingly viewed as an economically viable alternative to tightly coupled multiprocessors.In recent years, many scientific computing applications have been able to make effective use of various types of workstation clusters.The main difference between workstation clusters and the more traditional, tightly coupled distributedmemory systems is communication performance.In this paper we present a host-network interface architecture that supports efficient remote memory writes across standard ATM networks, bringing performance closer to that of special-purpose, tightly coupled systems for a large class of applications.We show that minimal hardware support is required on the adaptor, and that the required features are very similar to those already needed on adaptors for high-speed networks.We also describe an implementation of this architecture, and present measurements of communication performance indicating its effect on the breadth of applications that can use a general purpose network m an effective way.