Reducing the overhead of intra-node communication in clusters of SMPs

This article presents the C++ library vShark which reduces the intranode communication overhead of parallel programs on clusters of SMPs. The library is built on top of message-passing libraries like MPI to provide thread-safe communication but most importantly, to improve the communication between threads within one SMP node. vShark uses a modular but transparent design which makes it independent of specific communication libraries, Thus, different subsystems such as MPI, CORBA, or PVM could also be used for low-level communication. We present an implementation of vShark based on MPI and the POSIX thread library, and show that the efficient intra-node communication of vShark improves the performance of parallel algorithms.