Implementing Message Passing Communication with a Shared Memory Communication Mechanism

This thesis describes a high-performance implementation of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) library based on a shared memory communication mechanism. Our implementation, called MPI/MBCF, combines two protocols to utilize the shared memory communication mechanism: the write protocol and the eager protocol. In the write protocol, Remote Write is used for communication with no bu ering. In the eager protocol, Memory-Based FIFO is used for bu ering by the library. These two protocols are switched autonomously according to the precedence of send and receive functions. The performance of the MPI/MBCF was evaluated on a cluster of workstations. We measured the round-trip time and the peak bandwidth, and executed the NAS Parallel Benchmarks. The results show that a message passing library achieves high performance by using a shared memory communication mechanism.