The ParaStation Project: Using Workstations as Building Blocks for Parallel Computing

The Parastation communication fabric provides a high-speed communication network with user-level access to enable efficient parallel computing on workstation clusters. The architecture, implemented on off-the-shelf workstations coupled by the Parastation communication hardware, removes the kernel and common network protocols from the communication path while still providing full protection in a multiuser, multiprogramming environment. The programming interface presented by Parastation consists of a UNIX socket emulation and widely used parallel programming environments such as PVM, P4, and MPI. This allows porting a wide range of client/server and parallel applications to the Parastation architecture. Implementations of Parastation using various platforms, such as Digital's AlphaGeneration workstations and Linux PCs, achieve end-to-end (process-to-process) latencies as low as 2 @ms and a sustained bandwidth of up to 15 Mbyte/s per channel with small packets. Benchmarks using PVM on Parastation demonstrate real application performance of 1 GFLOP on an 8-node cluster.

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