Network of PCs as high-performance servers: requirements for a communication mechanism

Networks of commodity PCs have the potential to provide extremely cost-effective computing and information services. However, they will fulfil their promise only if their system performance is truly competitive with commercial multicomputers or multiprocessors. To achieve this goal, the requirements for the communication mechanism used in such a system must not only consider end-to-end communication performance, but also consider how to accommodate commodity PC hardware and commodity operating system software. This paper describes several such requirements learned in Shrimp project and shows that a careful design and implementation can yield a high-performance communication mechanism that satisfies these requirements.