Faster Message Passing in PVM

Honbo Zhou, Al Geist Mathematical Sciences Section Oak Ridge National Laboratory Oak Ridge, TN 37831 fzhou, [email protected] Abstract This paper describes di erent approaches to build faster message passing routes into PVM. One of the recent e orts is to use shared memory based channels to replace the socket-based routes between the PVM daemon and its local tasks. Another e ort is the constructing of a new route named PvmRouteAtm to exploit the bandwidth of an ATM network based on the socket-like application programming interface (API) from Fore Systems. Test results show that better performance has been reached with PvmRouteAtm compared with that of using PvmRouteDirect. The shared memory e ort failed to gain performance due to reasons such as context switching and slow semaphore operations. The second e ort is the main topic in this paper.