LFC: A Communication Substrate for Myrinet

LFC is a new, low-level communication substrate for Myrinet, designed to support the development of high-performance communication software for parallel systems. LFC is novel in two ways. First, it exploits Myrinet’s programmable network interface (NI) to implement flow control, forward multicast traffic, reduce the overhead of network interrupts, and to provide a network-wide fetch-and-add operation. Second, LFC uses a single flow control mechanism at the network interface level for both point-to-point and multicast traffic. The integrated flow control mechanism significantly simplifies the implementation of an efficient multicast. We describe the design and implementation of LFC; we also evaluate LFC’s performance by comparing LFC with two high-performance message-passing systems for Myrinet. Finally, we outline the implementation of two client systems that use LFC: CRL, a distributed shared memory system, and MPI, a standard message-passing system.

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