A multithreaded message passing environment for ATM LAN/WAN

Large scale High Performance Computing and Communication (HPCC) applications (e.g. Video-on-Demand, and HPDC) would require storage and processing capabilities which are beyond existing single computer systems. The current advances in networking technology (e.g. ATM) have made high performance network computing an attractive computing environment for such applications. However, using only high speed network is not sufficient to achieve high performance distributed computing environment unless some hardware and software problems have been resolved. These problems include the limited communication bandwidth available to the application, high overhead associated with context switching, redundant data copying during protocol processing and lack of support to overlap computation and communication at application level. In this paper, we propose a multithreaded message passing system for parallel/distributed processing that we refer to as NYNET communication system (NCS). NCS, being developed for NYNET (ATM wide area network testbed), is built on top of an ATM application programmer interface (API). The multithreaded environment allows applications to overlap computations and communications and provides a modular approach to support efficiently HPDC applications with different quality of service (QOS) requirements.