An Application-Oriented Communication System for Clusters of Workstations

The present paper proposes an application-oriented communication sub-system to be used in SNOW, a high-performance, application-oriented parallel-programming environment for dedicated clusters. The proposed communication sub-system is composed of a baseline architecture and a fam-ily of lightweight network interface protocols. Each one of these protocols is built on top of the baseline architecture and can be tailored in order to satisfy the needs of specic classes of parallel applications. The family of lightweight protocols, along with the baseline architecture that supports it, consists of a customizable component in EPOS, an application-oriented, component-based operating system that is the core of SNOW. The idea behind providing a set of low-level protocol implementations instead of a single monolithic protocol is that parallel applications running on dedicated clusters can improve their communication performance by using the most appropriate protocol for their needs