Abstract
PVM-SCI is a complete implementation of the PVM (parallel virtual machine) message-passing environment for SCI clusters. It provides two complementary communication mechanisms: the conventional TCP and UDP protocols that are also used by the standard PVM for sending messages from one task to another via the PVM daemons, and a special-purpose protocol that utilizes the fast SCI network when the PvmRouteDirect option is set. In the latter case, no time-consuming software protocol is used, resulting in a significantly reduced communication latency and improved data throughput.
With our work on PVM-SCI, we aimed at both, providing maximum communication performance over SCI and supporting transparent downgrading to other communication media (e.g. Ethernet, ATM) when SCI is not available. Hence, we have implemented PVM-SCI as a heterogeneous message-passing library that supports several interconnects and system environments.
PVM-SCI is fully compliant with the latest PVM release 3.4 It runs on Solaris, Linux and Windows NT.
The work presented in this chapter was done while both authors were at Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing, http://www.upb.de/pc2
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© 1999 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Fischer, M., Reinefeld, A. (1999). PVM for SCI Clusters. In: Hellwagner, H., Reinefeld, A. (eds) SCI: Scalable Coherent Interface. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1734. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/10704208_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/10704208_18
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