Abstract
One approach to reduce the multi-layer overhead of TCP/IP is to bypass it, accessing the LAN directly from user level. Most existing implementations of such a shortcut rely on a polling mechanism, they either support a single-user environment, or do not coexist with TCP/IP. In order to improve the PVM daemon network performance, we developed a new Direct Network Access (DNA) library for PVM and the Myrinet LAN, that bypasses and coexists with TCP/IP. The DNA includes a non-polling receive mechanism, an efficient mutual exclusion mechanism and a shared buffer management scheme, thus enabling operation in a time sharing environment. The paper describes the DNA and its integration in the PVM daemon, and presents performance results, which amount to a latency reduction of 18% for PVM tasks.
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© 1998 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Lavi, R., Barak, A. (1998). Improving the PVM daemon network performance by direct network access. In: Alexandrov, V., Dongarra, J. (eds) Recent Advances in Parallel Virtual Machine and Message Passing Interface. EuroPVM/MPI 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1497. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0056558
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0056558
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