PVM Performance Enhancement over a High-Speed Myrinet
Insoo Kim, Jae-Hong Shim, Kyunghee Choi, Gihyun Jung, Kyeong-Deok Moon, Tae-Geun Kim · The Transactions of the Korea Information Processing Society · 2000
PVM (parallel virtual machine) provides a programming environment that allows a collection of networked workstations to appear as a single parallel computational resource. The performance of parallel applications in this environment depends on the performance of data transfers between tasks. In this paper, we present a new Myrinet-based communication model of PVM that improves PVM communication performance over a high-speed Myrinet LAN. The proposed PVM communication model adopts a communication mechanism that allows any user-level process to directly access the network interface board without going through UDP/IP protocol stacks in the kernel. This mechanism provides faster data transfers between PVM tasks over the Myrinet since it avoids data copy overhead from kernel (user space) to user space (kernel) and reduces communication latency due to network protocol software layers. We implemented EPVM (Enhanced PVM), our updated version of the traditional PVM using UDP/IP, that is based on the proposed communication model over the Myrinet. Performance results show EPVM achieves communication speed-up of one to two over the traditional PVM.