Myrinet communication

In last year´s IEEE Micro special issue on the Hot Interconnects IV Symposium, we discussed our experiences with client-server computing on the Paragon-based Shrimp multicomputer. Since then we implemented the same virtual memory-mapped communication (VMMC) mechanism on the Myrinet-based Shrimp multicomputer (a set of Pentium PCs connected by a Myrinet network). In both cases we achieved protected, user-level, end-to-end performance close to the hardware limits. However, VMMC imposes a copy for high-level connection-oriented communication libraries. Therefore, we extended the model, and designed and built a new implementation. This update reports our latest work with VMMC on the Myrinet-based Shrimp multicomputer, which we call VMMC-2