An efficient end-host architecture for cluster communication

Cluster computing environments built from commodity hardware have provided a cost-effective solution for many scientific and high-performance applications. Likewise, middleware techniques have provided the basis for large-scale applications to communicate and exchange data across the various end-hosts in a distributed system. Unfortunately, middleware services are typically encapsulated in user-level address spaces that suffer from scheduling delays and communication overheads induced by the host kernel. For various high performance distributed computing applications such overheads are unacceptable. This paper therefore addresses the problem of providing an efficient endhost architecture to support application-specific communication services at user-level, without the need to explicitly schedule such services or copy data via the kernel. We briefly describe a sandboxing mechanism that allows applications to configure and deploy services at user-level, that may execute in the context o...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: CLUSTER
• Authors: Xin Qi, Gabriel Parmer, Richard West
• Keywords: Address Space, CLUSTER 2004, Comparable User-space Communication, Distributed And Parallel Computing, User-level Address