Publications

D. Buntinas and W. Gropp, "Understanding the Requirements Imposed by Programming Model Middleware on a Common Communication Subsystem," Technical Memorandum ANL/MCS-TM-277, September 2005. [pdf]

Communication subsystems are used in high-performance parallel computing systems to abstract the lower network layer. By using a communication subsystem, an upper middleware library or runtime system can be more easily ported to different interconnects. By abstracting the network layer, however, the designer typically makes the communication subsystem more specialized for that particular middleware library, making it ineffective for supporting middleware for other programming models. In previous work we analyzed the requirements of various programming-model middleware and the communication subsystems that support such requirements. We found that although there are no mutually exclusive requirements, none of the existing communication subsystems can efficiently support the programming model middleware we considered. In this paper, we describe our design of a common communication subsystem, called CCS, that can efficiently support various programming model middleware.
This work was supported by the Mathematical, Information, and Computational Sciences Division subprogram of the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy, under Contract W-31-109-ENG-38.