Optimal communication performance on fast ethernet with GAMMA

  • Giuseppe Ciaccio
Worshop on Personal Computer Based Networks of Workstations Giovanni Chiola, DISI, University of Genoa, Italy Gianni, Conte, University of Parma, Italy
First Online:
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 1388)

Abstract

The current prototype of the Genoa Active Message MAchine (GAMMA) is a low-overhead, Active Messages-based inter-process communication layer implemented mainly at kernel level in the Linux Operating System. It runs on a pool of low-cost Pentium-based Personal Computers (PCs) networked by a low-cost 100base-TX Ethernet hub to form a low-cost message-passing parallel platform. In this paper we describe in detail how GAMMA could achieve unprecedented communication performance (less than 13 μs one-way user-to-user latency time and up to 98% of the communication throughput of the raw interconnection hardware) on such a kind of low-cost parallel architecture.

Keywords

Active messages Fast Ethernet Inter-process communication Network of workstations Parallel processing 
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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1998

Authors and Affiliations

  • Giuseppe Ciaccio
    • 1
  1. 1.DISIUniversità di GenovaGenovaItaly

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