Ninf and PM: Communication libraries for global computing and high-performance cluster computing

This paper presents two advanced communication libraries, Ninf and PM. Ninf is an ongoing global network wide computing infrastructure project which allows users to access computational resources including hardware, software and scientific data distributed across a wide area network. Computational resources are shared as Ninf remote libraries executable at a remote Ninf server. Users can build an application by calling the libraries with the Ninf Remote Procedure Call. In order to facilitate location transparency and network-wide parallelism, Ninf metaserver maintains global resource information regarding computational server and databases, allocating and scheduling coarse-grained computation for global load balancing. PM is a high-performance communication library for workstation clusters connected with Myrinet gigabit LAN card, which has a dedicated processor and on-board memory to handle a communication protocol. In order to obtain high-performance communication and support a multi-user environment, we co-designed PM, an operating system realized by a daemon process, and the run-time routine for a programming language. Several unique features, e.g., network context switching and modified ACK/NACK flow control algorithm have been developed for PM. PM for the Suns has a speed of 20 mu s round trip for a user-level 8 bytes message and 38.6 Mbytes/s bandwidth for an 8 Kbytes message. Copyright (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.