A HIGH-PERFORMANCE MESSAGE-PASSING SYSTEM FOR NETWORK OF WORKSTATIONS

With the proliferation of Network of Workstations (NOW) environment, t here has been a great demand for a high performance message-passing sy stem to implement High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC) applic ations over NOW environment. NYNET (ATM wide area network testbed in N ew York state) Communication System (NCS) is a multithreaded message-p assing system developed at Syracuse University that provides low-laten cy and high-throughput communication services over the Asynchronous Tr ansfer Mode (ATM) based HPDC environment. NCS provides High Performanc e Application Communication Interface (HPI) to support applications th at demand high-throughput and low-latency communication services. This paper outlines the general architecture of NCS and presents the imple mentation approach of NCS HPI over an ATM network. This interface has been developed by modifying Fore Systems' ATM Application Programming Interface (API) and its device driver. NCS HPI uses read/write trap ro utines to bypass traditional operating system calls and kernel-level c ommunication interface (e.g., UNIX System V Streams). It reduces laten cy, data transfer time, and avoid using traditional communication prot ocols (e.g., TCP/IP). This substantially improves the communication pe rformance.