GAMMA: A low-cost network of workstations based on active messages.

Abstract

Networks Of Workstations (NOW) are an emerging architecture capable of supporting parallel processing with significantly low cost/performance ratio. At the moment the implementation of standard highlevel communication mechanisms in a NOW does not provide such a satisfactory cost/performance ratio, as modern communication hardware would allow. We show how a standard, Unix-like operating system kernel can be extended with efficient and performant low-level communication primitives based on the Active Message communication paradigm. Higher level standard communication libraries, like MPI, should be implemented on top of such efficient low-level mechanisms. We provide some preliminary results obtained from an experimental prototype called GAMMA (Genoa Active Message MAchine), which is a NOW whose nodes run the operating system Linux 2.0 enhanced with an Active Message communication layer. 1. Introduction The usual protocol stack which is predominant in the Unix environment for inter-proce...