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Abstract : |
Networks Of Workstations (NOW) are an emerging architecture capable of supporting parallel processing with significantly low cost/performance ratio. At the moment the implementation of standard highlevel communication mechanisms in a NOW does not provide such a satisfactory cost/performance ratio, as modern communication hardware would allow. We show how a standard, Unix-like operating system kernel can be extended with efficient and performant low-level communication primitives based on the Active Message communication paradigm. Higher level standard communication libraries, like MPI, should be implemented on top of such efficient low-level mechanisms. We provide some preliminary results obtained from an experimental prototype called GAMMA (Genoa Active Message MAchine), which is a NOW whose nodes run the operating system Linux 2.0 enhanced with an Active Message communication layer. 1., |
