Experience with the design of a communication pro

With the advent of high-speed LANs and rapid development of PC technologies, the communication software evolution has lagged behind. Traditional communication protocol stacks fail to deliver much of the performance of physical network to user applications. So efficient communication protocols are needed to take full advantage of the high performance of underlying interconnection networks. This paper analyzes the critical issues in designing an efficient communication protocol and introduces our experience with the design and implementation of FMP (Fast Message Passing). FMP is a reduced user-level message passing system designed for Myrinet-based PC clusters. It provides high-speed, reliable and in-order message delivery, and supports multiplexing and protective accessing of the network interface. Moreover, standard parallel programming interface including PVM/MPI on top of FMP are both implemented.