Madeleine II: a Portable and Efficient Communication Library for High-Performance Cluster Computing

This paper introduces Madeleine II, a new adaptive and portable multi-protocol implementation of the Madeleine communication library. Madeleine II has the ability to control multiple network interfaces (BIP, SISCI, VIA) and multiple network adapters (Ethernet, Myrinet, SCI) within the same application session. We report on performance measurements obtained using BIP/Myrinet and SISCI/SCI and we present preliminary results about our MPICH/Madeleine II and Nexus/Madeleine II ports. We also discuss an extension of Madeleine II for clusters of clusters which is able to handle heterogeneous networks. In particular, we present the fast internal data-forwarding mechanism that is used on gateway nodes to speed up intercluster transmissions. Preliminary experiments show that the resulting inter-cluster bandwidth is close to the one delivered by the hardware.