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

Abstract

A trend of emerging large-scale multi-core chip design is to employ multithreaded architectures- such as the IBM Cyclops-64 (C64) chip that integrates large number of hardware thread units, main memory banks and communication hardwares on a single chip. A cellular supercomputer is being developed based on a 3D connection of the C64 chips. This paper introduces our design, implementation, and evaluation of the Cyclops Datagram Protocol (CDP) for the IBM C64 multithreaded architecture and the C64 supercomputer system. CDP is inspired by the TCP/IP protocol. Its design is very simple and 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. It connects the C64 back-end to the front-end and forms a global uniform namespace for all nodes in the heterogeneous C64 system; (2) On a multithreaded architecture like C64, the CDP design and implementation effectively exploit the massive thread-level parallelism provided on the C64 hardware, achieving good performanc