EFFICIENT MULTITHREADED USER-SPACE TRANSPORT FOR NETWORK COMPUTING - DESIGN AND TEST OF THE TRAP PROTOCOL

We present a novel user-space and transaction-oriented protocol for us e in high-performance distributed computing applications. The TRAP pro tocol is designed to support low-latency communication in multithreade d message-passing libraries. To demonstrate the viability of TRAP, we implemented and tested the fully operational protocol and conducted se veral experiments comparing its runtime performance with that of popul ar communication libraries. For fairness, the experiments did not expl oit the TRAP protocol's multithreading capability at the application l evel. The results show that a TRAP-based communication library can, in various scenarios, outperform extant libraries based on in-kernel or user-level protocols. The results of these experiments also show that the TRAP protocol exhibits scalability characteristics, with respect t o number of computing and communicating nodes, that is superior to reg ular in-kernel TCP/IP and other user-space protocol implementations. ( C) 1997 Academic Press.