Abstract
This paper presents two advanced communication libraries, Ninf and PM.
Ninf is an ongoing global network-wide computing infrastructure project which
allows users to access computational resources including hardware, software
and scientific data distributed across a wide area network.
Computational resources are shared as Ninf remote libraries executable at a
remote Ninf server. Users can build an application by calling the libraries
with the Ninf Remote Procedure Call.
In order to facilitate location transparency and network-wide parallelism,
Ninf metaserver maintains global resource information regarding computational
server and databases, allocating and scheduling coarse-grained computation for
global load balancing.
PM is a high performance communication library for workstation clusters
connected with myrinet gigabit LAN card, which has a dedicated processor and
on-board memory to handle a communication protocol.
In order to obtain high performance communication and support a
multi-user environment, we co-designed PM, an operating system realized by
a daemon process, and the run-time routine for a programming language.
Several unique features, e.g., network context switching and modified
ACK/NACK flow control algorithm have been developed for PM.
PM for the Suns has a speed of 20 micro seconds round trip for a user-level
8 bytes message and 38.6 Mbytes/second bandwidth for an 8 Kbytes message.