High performance protocols for clusters of commodity workstations

Over the last few years technological advances in microprocessor and network technology have improved dramatically the performance achieved in clusters of commodity workstations. Despite those impressive improvements the cost of communication processing is still high. Traditional layered structured network protocols fail to achieve high throughputs because they access data several times. Network protocols which avoid routing through the kernel can remove this limit on communication performance and support very high transmission speeds which are comparable to the proprietary interconnection found in Massively Parallel Processors.