ComPaSS: efficient communication services for scalable architectures
Philip K. McKinley, Hong Xu, Edgar T. Kalns, Lionel Ming-shuan Ni · 1992
In massively parallel computers (MPCs), efficient communication among processors is critical to performance. This paper describes the initial implementation of the ComPaSS communication library to support scalable software development in MPCs. ComPaSS provides high-level global communication operations for both data manipulation and process control, many of which are based upon a small set of low-level communication primitives. The ComPaSS library is unique in that these low-level operations are provably optimal for a class of architectures representative of many commercial scalable systems, in particular, those using wormhole routing and n-dimensional mesh network topologies. This paper concentrates on the multicast component of the ComPaSS library, which is useful in several data parallel operations. The design of the multicast primitive is described, and an example of its use in a data parallel application is given. Improvements in performance resulting from use of the library on a ...