StarT X A One Man Year Exercise in Network Interface Engineering Computation Structures Group Memo July

This paper presents the StarT X PCI card a net work interface unit for the Arctic Switch Fabric StarT X provides a user level hardware interface for message passing on a cluster of PCI equipped host platforms StarT X supports three message passing mechanisms that are tuned for di erent granularities of communication On a SUN E with StarT X a processor can send and receive a byte message in less than and usec respectively and incur less than usec user to user latency StarT X s remote memory to memory DMA mechanism can transfer large data blocks at over MByte sec on SUN E s StarT X s hardware was developed in just over a year by a one man team StarT X and Arctic are currently installed on MIT LCS s Xolas Cluster of SUN E s and support MPI and Cilk programming interfaces The performance of these high level programming interfaces and a numerical application MITMatlab are reported