TELEGRAPHOS - A SUBSTRATE FOR HIGH-PERFORMANCE COMPUTING ON WORKSTATION CLUSTERS

Networks of workstations and high-performance microcomputers have been rarely used for running parallel applications, because, although they have significant aggregate computing power, they lack the support for efficient message-passing and shared-memory communication. In this pa per we present Telegraphos, a distributed system that provides efficie nt message-passing and shared-memory support on top of a workstation c luster, We focus on the network interface of Telegraphos that provides a variety of shared-memory operations such as remote read, remote wri te, remote atomic operations, and DMA, all launched from user level wi thout any intervention of the operating system, Telegraphos I, the Tel egraphos prototype, has been implemented, Emphasis was placed on rapid prototyping, so the technology used was conservative: FPGAs, SRAMs, a nd TTL buffers. (C) 1997 academic Press.