Fast message passing for high performance computation in workstation clusters

The message passing system is crucial to the computational performance of workstation clusters. With the fast growth in performance of networking device, the unnecessary overhead in traditional TCP/IP protocol has become the bottleneck of communication speed. To fully exploit the communication potential of the fast hardware, this paper introduces FMP, a new communication protocol specifically designed for Myrinet. FMP, which consists of a network part, is a concise protocol. The physical layer is assumed to be error free and thus the protocol becomes extremely simple and highly efficient. Compared with TCP/IP, the performance of FMP is much better. In this article the essential techniques used in the protocol are discussed and some results are presented.