Exploring a Multithreaded Methodology to Implement a Network Communication Protocol on the Cyclops-64 Multithreaded Architecture

Abstract

The IBM Cyclops-64 (C64) chip employs a multithreaded architecture that integrates a large number of hardware thread units on a single chip. A cellular supercomputer is being developed based on a 3D-mesh connection of the C64 chips. This paper introduces the Cyclops Datagram Protocol (CDP) developed for the C64 supercomputer system. CDP is inspired by the TCP/IP protocol, yet simpler and more compact. The implementation of CDP leverages the abundant hardware thread-level parallelism provided by the C64 multithreaded architecture. The main contributions of this paper are: (1) We have completed a design and implementation of CDP that is used as the fundamental communication infrastructure for the C64 supercomputer system. (2) CDP successfully exploits the massive thread-level parallelism provided on the C64 hardware, achieving good performance scalability; (3) CDP is quite efficient. Its peak throughput reaches 884Mbps on the Gigabit Ethernet, even it is running at the user-level on a single-processor Linux machine; (4) Extensive application test cases are passed and no reliability problems have been reported. 1