Directed Point: An Efficient Communication Subsystem for Cluster Computing
CM Lee, Tca Tam, CL Wang · 1998
In this paper, we present a new communication subsystem, Directed Point (DP) for parallel computing in a low-cost cluster of PCs. The DP model emphasizes high abstraction level of interprocess communication in a cluster. It provides simple application programming interface with syntax and semantics similar to UNIX I/O function call, to shorten the learning period. The DP achieves low latency and high bandwidth based on (1) a efficient communication protocol Directed Messaging, that fully utilizes the data portion of packet frame; (2) efficient buffer management based on a new data structure Token Buffer Pool that reduces the memory copy overhead and exploits the cache locality; and (3) light-weight messaging calls, based on INTEL x86 call gate, that minimizes the cross-domain overhead. The implementation of DP on a Pentium (133 MHz) cluster running Linux 2.0 achieves 46.6 microseconds round-trip latency and 12.2 MB/s bandwidth under 100 Mbit/s Fast Ethernet network. The DP is a loadable kernel module. It can be easily installed or uninstalled. 1.