FMP:A FAST MESSAGES PASSING FOR WORKSTATION CLUSTERS
Ju Shen · Chinese Journal of Computers · 1998
This paper describes the architecture and implementation of fast message passing communication (FMP) for a workstation cluster using Myrinet and Ultra 2. The goal of this work is to study how to reduce communication software overheads over workstation clusters and provide an implementation of a high performance communication protocol on a commercially available hardware platform. The Myrinet implementation of FMP achieves a round-trip latency of 11. 2 us for one-byte packets, and a bandwidth of 338Mb/s for 8192-byte packets on Ultra 2 workstations by using several techniques, such as user-level communication protocol, pipeline transmission, credit flow control and multithreading. The resultsprove that FMP can exploit the performance of modern networks. FMP not only provides low latency and high bandwidth communication, but also guarantees the reliability of message delivery and supports multiple senders and receivers in a multi-user envlronment.