Efficient collective operations with ATM network interface support

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to implementing collective communication operations across ATM-interconnected workstation clusters. Under this methodology, performance-critical components, and only these components, of the collective operation are moved "close-to-network", that is, they are performed by the ATM network interface. We argue that ATM network interfaces possess unique advantages for performing this task. Simulation results demonstrate that implementations resulting from this approach outperform conventional user-level implementations by a wide margin.