A Case for Kernel Level Implementation of Inter Process Communication Mechanisms

Distributed systems must provide some kind of inter process communication (IPC) mechanisms to enable communication between local and especially geographically dispersed and physically distributed processes. These mechanisms may be implemented at different levels of distributed systems namely at application level, library level, operating system interface level, or kernel level. Upper level implementations are intuitively simpler to develop but are less efficient. This paper provides hard evidence on this intuition. It considers two renowned IPC mechanisms, one implemented at library level, called MPI, and the other implemented at kernel level, called DIPC. It shows that the time taken to calculate the Pi number by a distributed system that uses MPI to program and run the calculation of Pi number in parallel is on average 35% slower than by the same distributed system that uses DIPC to program and run the calculation of Pi number in parallel. It is concluded that if distributed systems are to become an appropriate platform for high performance scientific computing of all kinds, it is necessary to try harder and implement IPC mechanisms at kernel level, even ignoring so many other factors in favor of kernel level implementations like safety, privilege, reliability, and primitiveness.