A multithreaded message-passing system for high performance distributed computing applications

NYNET (ATM wide area network testbed in New York state) Communication System (NCS) is a multithreaded message passing system developed at Syracase University that provides high performance and flexible communication services over asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) based high performance distributed computing (HPDC) environments. NCS capitalizes on thread based programming model to overlap computations and communications, and develop a dynamic message passing environment with separate data and control paths. This leads to a flexible and adaptive message passing environment that can support multiple flow control, error control, and multicasting algorithms. We provide an overview of the NCS architecture and present how NCS point to point communication services are implemented. We also analyze the overhead incurred by using multithreading and compare the performance of NCS point to point communication primitives with those of other message passing systems such as p4, PVM, and MPI. Benchmarking results indicate that NCS shows comparable performance to other systems for small message sizes but outperforms other systems for large message sizes.