Portals 3.0: Protocol Building Blocks for Low Overhead Communication

This paper describes the evolution of the Portals message passing architecture and programming interface from its initial development on tightly-coupled massively parallel platforms to the current implementation running on a 1792-node commodity PC Linux cluster. Portals provides the basic building blocks needed for higher-level protocols to implement scalable, low-overhead communication. Portals has several unique characteristics that differentiate it from other high-performance system-area data movement layers. This paper discusses several of these features and illustrates how they can impact the scalability and performance of higher-level message passing protocols. Keywords– message passing, network protocol, os bypass, workstation cluster, massively parallel

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: IPPS
• Authors: Ron Brightwell, William Lawry, Arthur B. Maccabe, Rolf Riesen
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, IPPS 2002, Massively Parallel, Message Passing, Message Passing Architecture