Designing a Common Communication Subsystem

Communication subsystems are used in high-performance parallel computing systems to abstract the lower network layer. By using a communication subsystem, an upper middleware library or runtime system can be more easily ported to different interconnects. However by abstracting the network layer, the designer will typically make the communication subsystem more specialized for that particular middleware library, and less general, making it ineffective for supporting middleware for other programming models. In previous work we analyzed the requirements of various programming model middleware and the communication subsystems that support them. We found that although the are no mutually exclusive requirements, none of the existing communication subsystems could efficiently support the programming model middleware we considered. In this paper, we describe our design of a common communication subsystem, called CCS, that can efficiently support various programming model middleware.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: PVM
• Authors: Darius Buntinas, William Gropp
• Keywords: Communication Subsystem, Programming Model, Programming Model Middleware, PVM 2005