Efficient layering for high speed communication: the MPI over Fast Messages (FM) experience

We describe our experience of designing, implementing, and evaluating two generations of high performance communication libraries, Fast Messages (FM) for Myrinet. In FM 1, we designed a simple interface and provided guarantees of reliable and in-order delivery, and flow control. While this was a significant improvement over previous systems, it was not enough. Layering MPI atop FM 1 showed that only about 35 % of the FM 1 bandwidth could be delivered to higher level communication APIs. Our second generation communication layer, FM 2, addresses the identified problems, providing gather-scatter, interlayer scheduling, receiver flow control, as well as some convenient API features which simplify programming. FM 2 can deliver 55–95 % to higher level APIs such as MPI. This is especially impressive as the absolute bandwidths delivered have increased over fourfold to 90 MB/s. We describe general issues encountered in matching two communication layers, and our solutions as embodied in FM 2

Performance Evaluation of JXTA Communication layers

The main goal of Project JXTA is to provide a peer-to-peer application framework based on a standard set of generic peer-to-peer protocols, independent of any particular platform or language. In spite of its recent popularity, the performance characteristics of the communication layers of JXTA are not well understood, though there is a general sentiment of inadequate performance. This paper examines the performance of the three JXTA communication layers: the JXTA sockets, JXTA pipe service and JXTA endpoint service. Round-trip time benchmarks are performed to evaluate the bandwidth and latency of each of the communication layers over both a Fast-Ethernet and a Myrinet network using the Java implementation of the JXTA protocols. The results show that, although the JXTA communications exhibit high latency, the Java binding of JXTA is able to reach the throughput of Java sockets. Very interesting results were obtained for benchmarks performed on high-performance Myrinet networks, where two out of the three JXTA communication layers were still able to achieve throughputs in excess of 1 Gb/s

Enabling JXTA for High Performance Grid Computing

Grid computing has recently emerged as a response to the growing demand for resources (processing power, storage, etc.) exhibited by scientific applications. However, as grid sizes increase, the need for self-organization and dynamic reconfigurations is becoming more and more important. Since such properties are exhibited by P2P systems, the convergence of grid computing and P2P computing seems natural. However, using P2P systems (usually running on the Internet) on a grid infrastructure (generally available as a federation of SAN-based clusters interconnected by high-bandwidth WANs) may raise the issue of the adequacy of the P2P communication mechanisms. This paper evaluates the communication performance of the JXTA P2P library over SANs and WANs, for both J2SE and C bindings. We analyze these results and we evaluate solutions able to improve the performance of JXTA on such grid infrastructures

pCoR - a protoype for resource oriented computing

In this paper we present CoR a resource oriented computing model that address the question of how to integrate user-level fine-grained multithreading, communication and coordination into a cluster of symmetrical multiprocessor computers. To support the design of complex distributed application using the proposed paradigm we built pCoR a run-time system which has new areas that represents extensions to the strict shared memory and message passing models supported by other platforms: remote operations, dynamic domains, communication ports, multithreading management, shared memory, replication and partition are some of its distinguished features. In addition, it provides a thread-safe transport communication layer to take advantage of modern high-performance commodity hardware/software like Myrinet network

F-MPJ: scalable Java message-passing communications on parallel systems

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in The Journal of Supercomputing. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-009-0270-0[Abstract] This paper presents F-MPJ (Fast MPJ), a scalable and efficient Message-Passing in Java (MPJ) communication middleware for parallel computing. The increasing interest in Java as the programming language of the multi-core era demands scalable performance on hybrid architectures (with both shared and distributed memory spaces). However, current Java communication middleware lacks efficient communication support. F-MPJ boosts this situation by: (1) providing efficient non-blocking communication, which allows communication overlapping and thus scalable performance; (2) taking advantage of shared memory systems and high-performance networks through the use of our high-performance Java sockets implementation (named JFS, Java Fast Sockets); (3) avoiding the use of communication buffers; and (4) optimizing MPJ collective primitives. Thus, F-MPJ significantly improves the scalability of current MPJ implementations. A performance evaluation on an InfiniBand multi-core cluster has shown that F-MPJ communication primitives outperform representative MPJ libraries up to 60 times. Furthermore, the use of F-MPJ in communication-intensive MPJ codes has increased their performance up to seven times.Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia; TIN2004-07797-C02Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia; TIN2007-67537-C03-2Xunta de Galicia; PGIDIT06PXIB105228P