Abstract
One approach to reduce the multi-layer overhead of TCP/IP is to bypass it, accessing the LAN directly from user level. Most existing implementations of such a shortcut rely on a polling mechanism, they either support a single-user environment, or do not coexist with TCP/IP. In order to improve the PVM daemon network performance, we developed a new Direct Network Access (DNA) library for PVM and the Myrinet LAN, that bypasses and coexists with TCP/IP. The DNA includes a non-polling receive mechanism, an efficient mutual exclusion mechanism and a shared buffer management scheme, thus enabling operation in a time sharing environment. The paper describes the DNA and its integration in the PVM daemon, and presents performance results, which amount to a latency reduction of 18% for PVM tasks.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
N.J. Boden, D. Cohen, R.E. Felderman, A.K. Kulawik, C.L. Seitz, J.N. Seizovic, and W-K. Su. Myrinet: A Gigabit-per-Second Local Area Network. IEEE Micro, 15(1):29–36, February 1995.
A. Geist, A Beguelin, J. Dongarra, W Jiang, R. Manchek, and V. Sunderam. PVM: Parallel Virtual Machine, A Users ' Guide and Tutorial for Networked Parallel Computing. The MIT Press, 1994.
I. Gilderman. Performance of the Communication Layers in Gigabit LANs. Master's thesis, Institute of Computer Science, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1997.
M. Lauria and A. Chien. MPI-FM: High Performance MPI on Workstation Clusters. Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, 40(1):4–18, January 1997.
A. M. Mainwaring and D. E. Culler. Active Message Applications Programming Interface and Communication Subsystem Organization. Technical Report CSD-96-918, U. C. Berkeley, October 1996.
M. K. McKusick, K. Bostic, M. J. Karels, and J. S. Quarterman. The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1996.
S. Pakin, M. Lauria, and A. Chien. High Performance Messaging on Workstations: Illinois Fast Messages (FM) for Myrinet. In Supercomputing, December 1995.
H. Tezuka, A. Hori, and Y. Ishikawa. PM: A High-Performance Communication Library for Multi-user Paralllel Environments. Technical Report TR-96-015, Tsukuba Research Center, Real World Computing Partnership, November 1996.
T. von Eicken, A. Basu, V. Buch, and W. Vogels. U-Net: A User-Level Network Interface for Parallel and Distributed Computing. In Proc. of the 15th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems principles, December 1995.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1998 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Lavi, R., Barak, A. (1998). Improving the PVM daemon network performance by direct network access. In: Alexandrov, V., Dongarra, J. (eds) Recent Advances in Parallel Virtual Machine and Message Passing Interface. EuroPVM/MPI 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1497. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0056558
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0056558
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-65041-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-49705-9
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive