ACS: An adaptive communication system for heterogeneous wide-area ATM clusters

This paper presents an architecture, implementation, and performance evaluation of an adaptive message-passing system for a heterogeneous wide-area ATM cluster that we call the Adaptive Communication System (ACS). ACS uses multithreading to provide efficient techniques for overlapping computation and communication in wide-area computing. By separating control and data activities, ACS eliminates unnecessary control transfers over the data path. This optimizes the data path and improves the performance. ACS supports several different flow control algorithms, error control algorithms, and multicasting algorithms. Furthermore, ACS allows programmers to select at runtime the suitable communication schemes per-connection basis to meet the requirements of a given application. ACS provides three application communication interfaces: Socket Communication Interface (SCI), ATM Communication Interface (ACI), and High Performance Interface (HPI) to support various classes of applications. The SCI is provided mainly for applications that must be portable to many different computing platforms. The ACI provides services that are compatible with ATM connection oriented services where each connection can be configured to meet the Quality of Service (QOS) requirements of that connection. This allows programmers to fully utilize the benefits of the ATM network. The HPI supports applications that demand low-latency and high-throughput communication services. In this interface, ACS uses read/write trap routines to reduce latency and data transfer time, and to avoid using traditional communication protocols. We analyze and compare the performance of ACS with those of other message-passing systems such as p4, PVM, and MPI in terms of point-to-point, multicasting, and application performance. The benchmarking results show that ACS outperforms other message-passing systems and provides flexible communication services for various classes of applications.