HIGH-PERFORMANCE COMPUTING OVER SWITCH-BASED HIGH-SPEED LOCAL NETWORKS

Recent progress in switch-based high-speed Local Area Networks (LANs) makes distributed network computing promising. Three evolving switch-b ased high-speed networks are the High Performance Parallel Interface ( HIPPI), Fiber Channel (FC), and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) stand ards. In this paper, we study how high-performance computing can be ca rried out over such networks. High-performance computing can be charac terized as follows: (1) It includes multiple modules and each module i s executed in a processor, (2) Its communication data flow forms a spe cial application topology and usually such application topologies are regular, and (3) It requires frequent communication between adjacent m odules in the application topology. Two traditional network protocols which allow processors to communicate in switch-based networks are cir cuit switching and packet switching. In order to reduce the amount of time required for a processor to set up a connection during the execut ion of an application, we propose a new communication protocol called the Virtual Permanent Connection (VPC). For a given application topolo gy, a set of connections are set up and permanently maintained during the execution of the application. Communication between processors are via this group of connections. In this paper, we study how a set of V PCs are chosen based on a given application topology (this process is called an Application Topology Embedding). We also study and compare t he performance of circuit switching, packet switching and the proposed VPC approach. (C) 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.