LAN protocols for high-performance distributed and concurrent computing

The number and variety of evolving high-performance distributed and concurrent applications motivate the development of novel and more suitable protocols for their support. We have developed a protocol framework within which concurrent applications may be developed and executed in a straightforward manner on heterogeneous LANs/ The protocols are specifically oriented towards the needs of concurrent applications, and are designed to be robust, efficient and lightweight. The protocols offer reliable and fast packet delivery in a variety of modes, including point to point broadcast, and dynamically variable multicast semantics. In addition, they support several high-level concurrent computing funcuons in an integral mamner, including global extrema and other arithmetic operations, polling, distributed consensus, and synchronization mechanisms. We discuss the salient design aspects of these protocols, describe the syntax and semantics of the user- interface protocol primitives, and, present performance results for varying network sizes and types.