EPOS and Myrinet:: Effective communication support for parallel applications running on clusters of commodity workstations

This paper presents the EPoS approach to deliver parallel applications a high performance communication system. EPoS is not an operating system, but a collection of components that can be arranged together to yield a variety of run-time systems, including complete operating systems. This paper focuses on the communication subsystem of EPOS, which is comprised by the network adapter and communicator scenario-independent system abstractions. Like other EPoS abstractions, they are adapted to specific execution scenarios by means of scenario adapters and are exported to application programmers via inflated interfaces. The paper also covers the implementation of the network adapter system abstraction for the Myrinet high-speed network. This implementation is based on a carefully designed communication pipeline and achieved unprecedented performance.