The ParaStation Project: Using Workstations as Building Blocks for Parallel Computing

The ParaStation communication fabric provides a high-speed communicationnetwork with user-levelaccess to enable e cientparallel computing on workstation clusters. The architecture, implemented on o -the-shelf workstations coupled by the ParaStation communication hardware, removesthe kerneland commonnetwork protocols from the communication path while still providing full protection in a multiuser, multiprogramming environment. The programming interface presented by ParaStation consists of a UNIX socket emulation and widely used parallel programming environments like PVM, P4, and MPI. This allows porting a wide range of client/server and parallel applications to the ParaStation architecture. The rst implementation of ParaStation using Digital's AlphaGeneration workstations achieves a communication latency as low as 2:5 s (process-to-process) and a sustained bandwidth of more than 10 Mbyte/s per process. Benchmarks using PVM on ParaStation demonstrate real application performance of...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 1998
• Where: ISCI
• Authors: Thomas M. Warschko, Joachim M. Blum, Walter F. Tichy
• Keywords: ISCI 1998, ParaStation Communication, ParaStation Communication Fabric, Workstations