Development of PVM Code for a Low Latency Switch Based Interconnect

Message passing as a means to distributed parallel computing is becoming more and more attractive for communication intensive applications. In this type of applications where the interchanged messages are rather short a small end-to-end latency is required. To achieve a small end-to-end latency it is necessary to have a fast switch based network with improved software. PVM as message passing tool in combination with an ethernet do not fulfill these requirements. By writing a device driver optimized for small messages and by porting the PVM routines to a Low Latency Switch Based Interconnect, better results can be achieved.