Data reshuffling in support of fast I/O for distributed-memory machines

Achieving high-speed network I/O on distributed memory systems is a hard problem because their architectures are, in general, ill-suited for communication with the external world One of the problems is that messages are distributed over the private memories of the distributed memory system. This can result in poor performance since communication includes a complex scatter/gather operation. This paper presents a strategy in which the task of creating large contiguous messages is performed on the distributed-memory system, thus minimizing the overhead on the network interface. The performance results for an implementation of this strategy for an iWarp system with a HIPPI interface board are presented