Exploiting the capabilities of the interconnection network on Dawning-1000

On Dawning-1000, the two-dimension mesh interconnection network enables low-latency, high-bandwidth communication, however, these capabilities have not been realized because of the high processing overhead imposed by existing communication software. Active Messages provide an efficient communication mechanism with small overhead, which may expose the raw capabilities of the underlying hardware. In addition, one of the most promising techniques, user-level communication, is often used to improve the performance of the traditional protocols such as TCP and UDP, and is also adopted in implementing the novel abstractions like Active Messages. Thus a user-level Active Messages model is designed and implemented on Dawning-1000. Preliminary experiments show that the combination of Active Messages mechanism and user-level communication technique is quite efficient in reducing software overhead associated with sending and receiving messages, and in exploiting the capabilities of the interconnection network.