Document Type

Article

Date

1998

Keywords

High Performance Distributed Computing, HPDC, Qualty of Service, QoS, New York Communication System, NCS, multithreaded message-passing system, PVM, MPI

Language

English

Disciplines

Computer Sciences

Description/Abstract

High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC) applications require low-latency and high-throughput communication services and HPDC applications have different Quality of Service (QOS) requirements (e.g., bandwidth requirement, flow/error control algorithms, etc.). The communication services provided by traditional message-passing systems are fixed and thus can not be changed to meet the requirements of different HPDC applications. NYNET (ATM wide area network testbed in New York state) Communication System (NCS) is a multithreaded message-passing system developed at Syracuse University that provides high-performance and flexible communication services. In this paper, we overview the general architecture of NCS and present how NCS communication services are implemented. NCS point-to-point communication is flexible in that users can configure efficient point-to-point primitives by selecting suitable flow control, error control algorithms, and communication interfaces on a per-connection basis. Furthermore, NCS architecture separates the data transfer and control connections and thus improves the performance of the point-to-point communication primitives. We analyze the overhead incurred by using multithreading and compare the performance of NCS point-to-point communication with those of other message-passing systems such as p4, PVM and MPI. Benchmarking results indicate that NCS shows comparable performance with other systems in transmitting small messages but outperforms other systems for large messages.

Download

Share

COinS