NPAC Technical Report SCCS-690
A Multithreaded Message Passing Environment for ATM LAN/WAN
Rajesh Yadav, Rajashekar Reddy, Salim Hariri, Geoffrey Fox
Submitted February 14 1995
Abstract
Large scale High Performance Computing and Communication (HPCC)
applications (e.g. Video-on-Demand, and HPDC) would require storage
and processing capabilities
which are beyond existing single computer systems.
The current advances in
networking technology (e.g. ATM) have made high performance network
computing an attractive computing environment for such applications.
However, using only high speed network is not sufficient to
achieve high performance distributed computing environment unless some
hardware and software problems have been resolved. These
problems include the limited communication bandwidth
available to the application, high overhead associated with
context switching, redundant data copying during
protocol processing and lack of support to overlap
computation and communication at application level.
In this paper, we propose a Multithreaded Message Passing
system for
Parallel/Distributed processing, that we refer to as NYNET
Communication System (NCS).
NCS, being developed for NYNET (ATM wide area network testbed), is
built on top of an ATM Application
Programmer Interface (API).
The Multithreaded environment allows applications to overlap
computations and communications and
provide a modular approach to support efficiently HPDC applications
with different quality of service (QOS) requirements.