Distributed Shared Memory mit Myrinet
Christopher Vinckier
Diploma Thesis Summer 1998
Supervisors: Assistant, Prof. T. Stricker
Institute for Computer Systems, ETH Zürich
Objectives
Using high-end PCs for parallel computing requires a high bandwidth interconnect with a
low latency. Communication software is not evolving at the same pace of the hardware
and current protocol stacks do not suffice when using such high speed networks for
parallel computing. This thesis examines the expansion of the Message Passing Library
to allow communication over a Myrinet network.
Beside the Message Passing Model used in parallel computing, which has proved itself to
be efficient and is a well understood tool for writing parallel programs, distributed shared
memory constitutes an alternative approach. A study has been made of a remote deposit
mechanism that is optimized for different kinds of access patterns. By means of this
mechanism, whole regions of memory can be transmitted to a second workstation via the
Myrinet-LAN-adapter making use of the coprocessor on the NIC to scatter the data.
Several APIs are available to drive the communication hardware. An own
implementation has been created to allow Zero-Copy-communication at rates of up to
120 MB/sec.
The author can be reached at mail-addr
[ CS-Department
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ETH Zürich: Department of Computer Science
Comments to Christian Kurmann <kurmann@inf.ethz.ch>
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