Architectural Issues and Preliminary Benchmarking of a Low-cost Network of Workstations based on Active Messages

The cheapest platforms for parallel processing are Networks of Workstations (NOWs) equipped with oo-the-shelf communication hardware and high-end Personal Computers running an operating system with networking capabilities. However standard network protocols and mechanisms cannot deliver a satisfactory amount of the raw communication performance to the application level. The Genoa Active Message MAchine (GAMMA) overcomes such a limitation by implementing the Active Message communication paradigm in a NOW architecture. The Active Message layer of GAMMA drastically shortens the communication path between two communicating processes while preserving a high-level and easy-to-use interface to SPMD/MIMD programming. A Parallel Matrix Multiplication (PMM) algorithm was run on GAMMA as a preliminary benchmark. The comparison between the performance achieved by PMM on GAMMA and the performance achieved by PMM with Linux TCP/IP communications on the same hardware platform demonstrate the success of the GAMMA approach.